> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.
Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.
Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.
Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.
The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers.
The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you.
I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction.
I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields).
It definitely uses connection IPs as some heuristic.
I exclusively used Facebook for family (years ago before deleting it) and received recommendations of otherwise socially-unconnected roommates who habitually accessed FB through house wifi.
I don't think that they'd go as far as scanning mailboxes, the return on the effort doesn't seem worth it. More likely the person you were connected to added you to an address book (or perhaps their mailer added you automatically) as someone they have dealt with before. Some anti-spam measures use a source address existing in a connected addressbook as a whitelisting clue.
I'll bite. When I worked there I didn't see the management as idealistic, but the news media vis a vis the employee base had a lot of power. Many times I saw fiery journalism create direct confrontations between Zuck and ordinary employees about things like the company's moderation reaction to the shocking "napalm girl" wartime photo. Back then employees often won, creating shifts on company policy that felt like would not have happened otherwise. At some point it seems that the company decided that it wanted its people to have less of that kind of power though, presumably because it created a liberal company and Zuck seems to see the idea of Facebook as a liberal entity as a serious threat to his company
> Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names
No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable.
> Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social graph". (see Cambridge analytica, although actually its much more smoke and mirrors than you might imagine)
They needed to cut down that access because 1) they'd been told to 2) they realised that people could extract that data for free, thus denting their analytics advantage that made advertising so lucrative.
FB used to have granular privacy controls and no "feed" -- you wrote on someone's wall, they wrote on yours, and people had to actively click on your profile to see the messages rather than have them thrust front and center.
FB abandoned that commitment to privacy and has suffered as a result.
Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same.
>Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names
That was (and is) a fantastic feature, and I remember being aware of it when I signed up. It was super easy to meet people in real life then find them on Facebook, and then invite them to future events in real life or keep track of what they're up to.
Also Myspace allowing HTML resulted in a bunch of entirely unreadable pages. And the Myspace extended friend network didn't really work because everyone was friends with Myspace Tom (who by all means seems to be a chill guy IRL)
>Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
If anything, Facebook was too friendly to third party devs (which does track with your comparison with Amazon, which I think is far too friendly to third party sellers). Third party apps are anti-features IMO. Should've just stuck to its core functionality, connecting you with people you know, and showing you content from groups that you have chosen to join (which you can still get in your newsfeed if you aggressively block and hide almost everything, which I do lol)
> Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start
I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys of a Nokia or Motorola phone. It was delightful. You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
Facebook was something you did on your computer. There were lots of ads and they had just launched the algorithmic news feed. It was the beginning of something bad IMHO.
I think I got an account in late 2007 or 2008, so perhaps it was different in 2006 or early 2007. But I do remember in 2009, Ashton Kutcher was in the news for having a million followers on Twitter, so the time where it was not for celebrity gossip was certainly brief.
I also generally prefer not to be notified by things on my phone if I can avoid it, computer use is more deliberate.
>You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
But I certainly knew all the people I was friends with on Facebook, they were people I first met in person, and it had their names.
I think fundamentally, I dislike the asymmetric nature of "following" people on Twitter (or Instagram or whatever). On Facebook you are friends or you are not. Obviously you can hide/mute people or whatever but the fundamental interaction is mutual.
Back then, it was always different at the start. This was when digital services were built with the service, not exit, in mind.
Or maybe it's just me looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? Yet I really feel the rot wasn't always there, it set in over time and eventually encompassed all. Today, I pretty much assume that any new service is an exit-seeking scam until proven otherwise; I don't remember having much reason for that 15 years ago.
Agreed, a lot of companies I can make an argument for believe in many being "idealistic" at some point. (admittedly I'm using "idealistic" as a very wide ranging concept here)
Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.
> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.
I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source.
My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!).
I think that the decisions to contribute to open source are calculated business decisions made to benefit the organization by:
* Getting outside contributions to the software that's widely used inside an organization
* Getting more people familiar with the software so that when they're hired they are already up to speed
* Attracting talent
* Improving PR
* Undermining competition (Llama?)
Regardless of the reasons, I think that there's a huge net benefit to society from large companies open-sourcing their software. I just don't think that's an argument to view these companies more favorably.
> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess)
Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves
At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.
And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".
> At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.
Of course not. GraphQL has vastly simplified our backend development, and has also resulted in better coordination between backend and frontend teams. There are so many things which GraphQL gets right - TYPES and schemas, traversing entity relationships, selectively querying fields, builtin API explorer etc. We use REST only for super trivial projects.
I'm more of an ops person and had the misfortune having to assist an inherited Drupal/static site generator project that heavily used GraphQL. It was not fun to debug this crap, and that is my biggest issue - as if the SSG setup itself isn't already a pain in the ass, adding GraphQL to the build stack was just the icing on the cake.
(One of the issues the dev team faced was the insane amount of RAM that was consumed by the GraphQL crap in both the FE and BE containers, which was a pain to debug for the FE side because that was an ephemeral container on an EKS environment)
IMHO, GraphQL entices developers on both ends to just be lazy and throw the complexity to the other team, and Ops who has to support both teams and mediate between both sides who just blame the other side for being too dumb.
I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
> GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes
That explains some of the experiences ive seen at small companies! From my pov it was "design-by-resume." People wanted to play w tech for their next job, with less concern for what the business needed.
There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't.
I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.
>Zuckerberg's Law: The amount each person shares double each year.
Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false. I (and most people I know) are posting ("sharing") less and less. Faced with a surveillance panopticon, I think many normal people are opting out. Peer-to-peer networks are withering.
The internet is reverting to the format of traditional media, with two distinct classes of broadcasters ('influencers') and audience members.
That law exists at least since 2008, over a decade and a half ago. It’s plausible it was true and born from observation at the time. The first Snowden documents were published half a decade later, in 2013.
The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.
If you do it as a blanket statement — i.e. all politicians lie all the time — then yes, I will be pretty irritated.
Some politicians spout dangerous nonsense most of the time.
Other politicians can be trusted most of the time, and when they lie it tends towards 'spin' or 'being economical with the truth' (such as: "we are spending more on education than ever before" — when this is true in nominal/absolute terms but false in real/per-pupil terms).
There is a world of difference between these positions, and treating them alike (as many do) undermines democracies.
I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either.
Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.
It was also born by the guy - Zuck and arguably in a similar spirit - who initially created a hot or not webpage to rank female college classmates by "fuckability". No clue how any of this would come as a surprise if you know his history.
Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory.
I remember de people graph search when no privacy settings really existed and people kept complete and updated profiles. It was the ultimate stalker took. Absolute batshit crazy that it existed even for the short time it did.
Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people.
There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want.
As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel).
As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1].
Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...
I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, spiritually toxic shit:
> Wynn-Williams’ critiques aren’t limited to Zuckerberg. She describes the working culture under Sandberg as so intense that Wynn-Williams felt pressured to send her talking points while in labor, her feet in stirrups.
My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever expect to be working. The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.
I think the second take is more likely. And even if we think it's bizarre that someone could get to the point where they believe that kind of devotion to their job is necessary, it's still alarming and raises red flags that a company culture could cause someone to get to the point that they'd feel that way.
I am inclined to agree with you but I do have a bit of nuance to add. Pretty sure this is not going to be a popular opinion but I think the second POV you present is apt but dependant on hierarchy level as well as each individual's drive to succeed.
From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life and work, no one will do it for you. I am all for supporting employees on all levels (and sure her superior could and should have done some things differently) but if your aspirations and perseverance get you to the point where you are flirting with the C suite, you should also be aware the you own your decisions now.
On the other hand, if you are that far in, that you are "flirting with the C suite", it is almost impossible not to have knowledge about you having joined a data gobbling sect/mafia, that will eat you up alive, if you upset them. So while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.
> while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.
I don't understand. In my world view, owning your decisions includes understanding the paths those decisions might lead to and finding your ~piece~peace with that.
This is a minor typo whose real intent was still understandable, you fixed it right away, and no one had replied yet. Adding the fake strike through and edit note makes your post a bit harder and more inconvenient to read with no advantage. You can just edit it in place, there would be no harm to it.
It sounds like one of the issues was that the C-Suite flirted with her
>Wynn-Williams also writes that Kaplan, as her boss, made inappropriate comments to her, including repeatedly asking where she was bleeding from after childbirth. She writes that, shortly after he called her sultry in front of other co-workers, Kaplan ground into her on a dance floor. She triggered an investigation into Kaplan and writes that she was “almost immediately” retaliated against with a cut in duties before eventually being fired. Wynn-Williams describes the investigation as a “farce.”
Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.
Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".
I am sorry, but this attitude is sexist. My allies are those I can relate to, those which I can cooperate with. I don't pick my allies based on gender, and nor should you. And you shouldn't coerce anyone into forming alliances based on gender. It is the person that matters, not their gender or race or whatever other random attribute.
Its sexism all the way down - Sandberg would not have done that to a male subordinate (who's wife was giving birth) and a male boss would not have done that to Wynn-Williams.
Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.
I'm not sure whether men are truly better on average, or women are just on average more conditioned by our societies not to do so or even if, to do so in a manner that isn't effective.
Unlearning ~2 decades of upbringing, education, expectations, some of that from religion, etc when entering the workforce could be pretty hard and significantly affect any statistics around this.
I don’t think anyone reasonably thinks that’s what the poster was saying. Presumably the violence is in creating the type of work environment where you are so oppressed or manipulated that you feel immense pressure to reply in that situation.
If you’re checking your work email and replying to it during labour, I somehow doubt you feel like you were being “asked” and respected as a human being.
But I don’t know the full story from all parties, and I get the feeling you don’t either. I wasn’t judging this particular case in my previous reply, merely pointing out that violence can take many forms and we shouldn’t narrow our thinking of what it means to do harm.
I agree for something like a McDonalds employee or even entry level software engineer but this is a senior managerial role at Facebook. Nobody needs to do this job. Unless your spending is out of control you do not need this income. So if it comes with unreasonable demands, I don’t really care. There are problems worth caring about and this ain’t one of them.
What the leadership does will be mirrored down to the grunt. I have never lead a multi billion dollars corporation but from my view if your team can discard someone easily, they can also bear not having that person around for two weeks. Or a year.
Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.
In an alternative version of reality, she would be so distracted, that she failed to give birth and the child died as a consequence of her being completely absorbed in a toxic work culture. That alternative version of reality would be completely believable, and probably many would not be more surprised than now reading this news. This tells us all we need to know about FB.
> The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.
Honestly, they need to grow a pair
This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries
You're a top-level executive and you're afraid of being let go by such a silly thing? They can't wait 2 or 3 days for "top level bullet points"? Seems like they depend on you more than you depend on them
Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious.
She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.
They tend to have cult dynamics because the people who subscribe to the cult dynamics are the ones who get promoted. If you’re happy to just make a living as a software engineer instead of trying to propel your way up the ladder of the world’s richest companies then you can live very happily and comfortably.
Yes, but this is not the people they'll hire for this kind of job. They're looking for the batshit crazy that will do this kind of stuff. This is the reason for the psychological profile they do in lieu of interview, when hiring managers.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. These cowards are ruining workplaces everywhere by having no backbone and subjecting their subordinates to the whims of psychopathic leaders.
Edit: it’s OK Meta employees. The best time to quit was years ago, the second best time is today.
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."
It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries.
> website that can influence elections in major countries,
I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.
The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.
FB has become AI slop no man's land.
I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.
I think people still use FB because it given them something to feel better. In Twitter/X you see all kinds of bad things happening, but in FB they sign up for groups that send only the things they like to see (most of that being fake, anyway).
Twitter is not the place where the masses are being influenced. Especially outside the US, as in most other countries Twitter barely found adoption outside of tech and journalist circles.
The majority of voting people (= old people) are still on Facebook. And besides Facebook, Meta also own Instagram. Meta is definitely the single company with the most encompassing political influence tool, should it choose to use it.
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Do you want your job still?
sure you can take "holiday", but if you don't please your capricious master, you'll not have a job to come back to.
I can well believe that Sandberg is someone who lacks empathy of her immediate underlings, the mission comes first after all.
At a certain point ones unwillingness to accept consequences is capitulation pure and simple and it is what allows people to continue to behave shittily. Takes 2 to tango.
None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.
Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.
Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.
> just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.
And just because that product does something you need doesn't mean it's not trash. GP didn't say "all cloud, all social media, all cars". Heck, literal trash is not all trash, people throw away a lot of good stuff.
Many people thought Tesla cars are diamond studded trash since Musk was still an idol. And it was pretty objective, great motor/battery surrounded by bargain bin components.
Do we need that person to keep having the product though?
> Most people don't give two fraks...
They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone.
But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship?
The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a scale never seen before. Is that an issue?
Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?
Maybe these public platforms would better serve the people using them without the person running/ruining/most associated with the brand?
I'm first to argue that, past certain size, social media platforms become de-facto town squares / utilities, and should be treated as such. But, until they are...
> Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?
... until they are, it's kind of the core axiom behind capitalism and market economy and social order in most places around the world, that this is his money, and if he wants to be "squandering the resulting cash on" (according to you) "asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse", it's his prerogative.
Sure, currently Zuck can do anything he wants with the money he gets from the users in his cage.
We should really open the cage though. Can you imagine being able to call people only on your mobile network, or being able to send e-mail only to people using the same e-mail provider?
Yet we accept only being able to connect with, share photos and posts, message, subscribe to people on the same social platform as you are.
If we can define a technical specification for exchanging social data, and enforce that the platforms above certain size implement it, Zuck won't even have the cash to dump on Metaverse. Every platform can then have their own algorithmic feed so you can chose your own echo chamber.
The moat is only good the Zucks of the world. It absolutely sucks for everyone else.
I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life.
His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of people) are different to ours. They got a different vision of this world (which of course it costs them nothing - until Communism settles and they are beheaded for having two homes, SP500 investments, and going scuba-diving across the planet!!)
> Most people don't give two fraks
"What are you talking about dude?? I got all these Gmail, and OneDrive, and Webex stuff for free!! It's like modern day communism!!" /s
This post is such a cocktail of confusion with a dash of McCarthyism that I have to say thank you for existing, and keeping the torch of this muddled thinking all the way from the post-war period.
Thank you for never learning what communism means, for staying embattled and internalising the narrative, for your anecdotes about your rich friend who doesn't realize that communists are lurking out there, waiting to kill him and everyone with wealth, once they get in power.
I'd ask you to never change, but I know that you won't, you'll paint your future thoughts through the same stencil that I've heard and seen so many times. When you express this it feels like I get a taste of the real America, a trailer park with the metheads, the uncle that just got back from jail, educating his young nephew about how the world works.
"You see son, there are rich people and they are good. And there are bad folks called communists that are jealous and want to kill the good rich folks. Be sure to carry your gun with you and if you see any of them communists, shoot them up. Because we will be rich one day. God bless America."
That's a very naive take, not using their products doesn't stop them from negatively impacting society. Look at what Musk is doing over the whole world (and the other two aren't much better, just not as obvious about it). It's not about being fair or jealous or whatever, a single individual having so much wealth and thus power is simply not healthy for society.
The problem is these companies buy competitors or bribe hardware/platforms in order to get market monopoly. So often it's impossible to find alternative products.
It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.
You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace hosts file, add firewall on your Android and block ad broker, doubleclick, adjust, mopub, google analytics, etc. etc (loooooong list).
Surveillance capitalism is not going anywhere. Where money can be made, money will be made.
> It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.
Firstly, this is just not true. Like basically all users who couldn't be mapped to a FB person were given userid=0, which I guess is a shadow account, but it's pretty crap as a method of tracking people. Source: worked at FB for half a decade.
Have you tried figuring it out? It's not magic or miracle, there are reasons why they're profitable and if it's not obvious you might get surprised and learn something if you try to study it.
One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.
These kinds of amoral corporate hierarchies will by their nature promote people who give themselves over entirely to the business. It's not that everyone who works there turns into that kind of corporate drone, it just weeds out the people who value more of a work/life balance. If someone is willing to send talking point while they're in labour, a company with the corporate culture of Facebook isn't going to stop them, they're going to be rewarded.
It's not just about one individual pushing for more... it's the entire system that values work over personal well-being and creates an environment where people feel they can't step away, even during life-changing events.
There is a whole industry in the US to celebrate that some people are getting richer. And it is literally funded by some of the richest people in that list.
Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?
Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.
Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.
Presumably this is intended to lead into an argument that because we disagree on exactly where the limit should be we shouldn’t have a limit at all. We could make the same case against drunk driving, speed limits, age of consent laws, maximum sentencing…
Yeah, I don't know why we would need a limit, I'm sure if a temper tantrum devolves into one of them building their own robo army. The others will follow suit and it will all just balance itself out.
Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten.
Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.
But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it.
Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators.
What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
Then the people who punish those in power will gain too much power.
The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.
Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.
There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term.
I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.
Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.
Somewhat similar to Paul Graham's essay _Inequality and Risk_[1]:
> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.
> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?
This is a convenient cover because it allows people to convert a measurable and fairly concrete thing into a more vague and flexible thing. Suddenly, all somebody needs to do is make a claim that what they are doing isn't corruption and they are off the hook. They'll be hypothetical billionaires that are the problem, but never any actual action.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.
I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.
Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.
Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?
I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".
Power can be diffused.
Wealth accumulation is power concentration. When it's legal to buy politicians then what is corruption? How can you go after corruption when those with power define what is corruption?
Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.
One question is why communism is a problem. It is a problem because it is a totalitarian regime. I.e., a non-democratic government. I am not sure limiting peoples wealth is the actual problem with communism.
Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.
'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.
You can limit people's wealth and it's not communism. If it was communism then they wouldn't have any wealth at all. A limit would just be democratic capitalism with a limit. There's no rule in capitalism that says you can't be taxed, or that the taxes couldn't be designed to approach a wealth limit. It's an economic system, not an entire governmental and social handbook.
There are several faults with this reasoning. Capital attracts capital, and with too low of marginal taxes, it pools at the top, increasing wealth inequality, hurting the non-elite's ability to compete, and squeezes the middle class. To say marginal taxes is communism is just wrong.
Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.
Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.
> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)
This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.
> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.
Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.
And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).
The imperfections of 'big' people have much more ramifications than the imperfections of 'small' people. Humans work best together in much more egalitarian groups where the imperfections of individuals are compensated by the strengths of other individuals.
> Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...
People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!
She said Wynn-Williams’ allegations about Kaplan are false, and in a Thursday statement, she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process.
(emph, mine)
This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.
I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers?
Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?
I mean if you're publishing a book, especially a tell-all one, you'd go and talk to sources familiar with the matter who can independently verify whether the statements are true or not to shield you against defamation lawsuits.
Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit
A Youtuber I follow got in an argument a couple of days ago with someone who kept claiming the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was primarily voluntary (not by force or a response to threats to their safety). The Youtuber kept asking him for sources (providing his own to the contrary), and the contrarian kept, I shit you not, asking Grok and then citing Grok as his source.
> skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process."
And the industry in question has compromised its host culture. What is Truth now?
This billionaire corporate sociopath suggested "Facebook remake the news ecosystem with the company at its center."
How is the corporate propaganda business working out socially and politically? I see the stock valuations — perhaps they are a measure of what has been lost in stability and community.
> "I’ve seen him face so many choices and lose touch with whatever fundamental human decency"
Including the rush to dismantle fact-checking in his corporation's product, which has become THE news source for millions of citizens.
> she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process.”
Why don't we let the community decide, instead of these bureaucratic, free speech-chilling "fact checkers"? If it's good enough for your employer, it should be good enough for you.
People may be interested in the interview with Wynn-Williams (the whistleblower) on the News Agents podcast: https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DrpKCA/ (it's a UK news/political podcast very popular in the UK).
From what they said at the beginning I think this is her first big podcast interview about the book/her claims. I wonder if she chose a UK podcast because of the US arbiter ruling.
Don't worry Zuckerberg is a free speech crusader. She can post all her criticism directly on Facebook and it won't be removed, whether it is true or not.
Oh Facebook is taking her to court to block her speech? Hmmm..
All else aside Zuck was basically a kid when the whole Facebook rocket ship ride took off. Nobody is their best self all day every day. Personally I always thought he came over as kind of an asshole but you have to keep hit pieces like these in the right frame. The shortest accurate answer to what's Zuck like is "I never met him" the rest is just clicks and hot air.
But the author here worked with him directly for years, the article recounts several personal interactions that went weird. You haven't met him, neither have I, but the person we're talking about certainly has.
Are you really saying that first hand evidence of Zuck’s character is irrelevant to our understanding of him because it relates to a period when he was relatively young? We can’t use that together with his more recent actions to create a more complete picture of his character and motivations. That biographies should all start at age 30?
The fact that Meta is aggressively trying to suppress the book just reinforces the point. If it were all "misleading and unfounded," they wouldn't need to fight this hard to bury it.
That's a fair point, repetition can make falsehoods stick. But if the book were full of outright lies, Meta could challenge it with clear evidence rather than legal pressure
Can anyone answer this question, assuming its answerable:
if they signed a mutual non-disparagement agreement, and they are currently using that agreement to stop a publication, if meta goes and breaks that agreement, doesn't that nullify the contract?
This place worships Zuck because he apparently “open sourced” AI. It’s the most ridiculous narrative on its own but we also live in the most absurd moment in history.
What's a surprise, a guy who has stolen startup from Winklevoss brothers and had to settle the case in the court has a "brutal image". Who would've expected that!
you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer and not having non-questionable morals. I can make up different stuff about how a ceo can be amoral, and those would still apply to zuck / {{ whoelse }}
book meant to be sold at airports for bored people. non-story.
This is probably true if you look at all big tech companies, but before Windows, MacOS, Oracle Databases or IBM computers did not have the responsibility of dealing with the communication and shaping of world view of billions of people world wide.
It's the same as owning a large share of news papers or TV channels. You own the public discourse.
If Larry Ellison is a greedy immoral bastard I switch to MS SQL Server, or something open source. When Zuckerberg or Musk became greedy immoral bastards, they started to shape the information fed to the world. You can decide not to buy a Tesla, but you cannot escape the results of brainwashing of other people that vote.
Bill Gates had serious trouble for including a free Internet Browser in his Operating System, because he was not able to influence the public discourse. The new internet mass communication companies do. Google never really got into much trouble while their monopoly was stronger.
I know your comment isn't about Elon specifically and I have my own reservations about some of what he does, but it's important to point out (and maybe this depends on what you call "misinformation", it shapes all future discussion) that Twitter absolutely was censoring for partisan reasons (before he bought it; I know some have complained Musk does indeed ban his critics) including silencing covid dissent, real doctors and researchers getting kicked off. Him acquiring it was absolutely necessary to break the deadlock
Edit: We do not want our platforms to be owned by someone like Susan Wojcicki who inflated her own importance and who thought mass censorship is ok (Google has really abrogated their responsibility here)
Everything is not partisan it might be political. The Republican vs. Democratic is hurting the US badly you can not continue to make everything ok just because you need the support from whatever extreme views is populist in your party.
Most of the things a party does is not extreme but you guys are going insane over there.
Sorry not sorry, but that was no "nothingburger." The fact of the matter was that Twitter under Jack Dorsey had become completely bloated and abusive. You had people working there whose only job was to do things like manipulate pixels in emojis and more seriously, they had created a vast and cancerous DEI bureaucracy.
Seems like historical founders/CEOs like e.g. Hewlett and Packard were relatively decent people despite being immensely successful.
So at least it was possible back in the day (of course after this many years a lot of details were lost and overall standards and expectations were very different back then).
> you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer
This is nonsense. Plenty of good people are wildly successful. The difference is they aren’t addicted to the role, and so see a future for themselves beyond it. Connecting with that future self, in turn, effects their decisions today—at work, at home, in society.
We have a cadre of sociopaths leading our commercial giants. That is a fixable problem. Saying it’s a non-story is just being nihilistic and lazy.
> Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility
Boards have plenty of things they're properly responsible for. CEO sociopathy isn't one of them, especially not if it's the profitable type of assholery. The regulation has to come from outside.
> you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer
This idea is very parochial and American, and it's unfortunate in
spreading a wrong idea that gives license for some people to behave as
hooligans.
There are massive global companies most of us have never heard of,
with CEOs who shun publicity and operate in what is really a
mild-mannered but highly competent fashion.
Power also comes from politeness, tact, diplomacy, and the earned
attachment of subordinates we call "respect".
They are not constantly immersed in scandal and drama because most of
the employees never have much cause to interact negatively.
The cult of US Tech leaders is a vile and embarrassing spectacle of
vanity, tantrums, acting-out, histrionics and arrogance. It's very
poor human behaviour that harms the perception of business in the
wider world, and we should not hold it up as normative.
On a different note; it's funny how otherwise reasonable people (on HN but also in general) become stereotypical gossiping girls whenever there's expose on %famous_person% or a cheap ideological position to have fun with. Woah, corporate America sure rewards the fucked-up people! We do, indeed, live in a society. Chirp chirp
I unfortunately agree with this take, but her (probably) being a crappy person and looking to monetize her experience is exactly why she worked there and there is likely a lot of truth there under her bias.
Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.
So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.
_Centralized platforms_ socialising happened around 2004, Facebook being one big survivor of that time. Because then, centralising stuff to provide a massive service proved more efficient (money wise: resources, investment, control, ads).
But socialising on the internet? There were plenty of options before, around and after then. Only, they didn't get the same support, convergence and effort since then. Because most people trusted the centralized services would opt to do the right things eventually. Ha. Fools were we.
Not really surprised. It's good to have more people talking about how these people act out of the public eye. But all of this makes me a little less optimistic, and just reminds me that powerful people are rarely held accountable for all the messed up stuff they do.
My conception of world conquering ambition comes mostly from popular media so trying to imagine Zuckerberg trying to become the world's stenographer through a platform that is 90% boomer-bait AI slop is a bit disorienting.
> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies.
Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names. It had the best network effect because of its real name policy (you could easily find people you knew), but it didn't tell you about it, it just posted your name from the sign-up page, which was kind of a dark pattern at the time.
Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you. But don't try scraping your own contacts out of Facebook, that's wrong.
Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Facebook has always been ruthless and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.
The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers.
This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and motivations of the early years: https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/the-great-political-films%...
The main conclusion is that Zuckerberg is a pure, amoral opportunist, which is why Facebook has been so successful through an era of "ask for forgiveness, not permission".
> Facebook also had a tool that would let you give them your username and password for other sites, and would scrape contacts for you.
I remember FB recommending me a contact, I thought "Why does that distinctive name sound familar?". I looked through my e-mails and I had sent a few emails back and forth with the person because of an eBay transaction.
I know I never told FB to scrape my email account, but I'm guessing this person did. And it's certainly not even the address book, but the email addresses from people's inboxes (and why not the names from the "From" field as well. If I was tasked with this I'd even suggest scraping any signature fields).
Hey, at least it bought Zuck a $900K watch.
Facebook is routinely suggesting me contacts that I have met and interacted with offline, the only link to them being an entry in my phone book.
Which, I'm guessing, I allowed Messenger to have access to at some point.
Other than that, it's inference from GPS/location data, which Meta, as far as I know, didn't deny doing.
Could also be coming from the other side of that contact interaction.
Were you ever connected to the same Wifi network? You can probably use that for tracking too.
It definitely uses connection IPs as some heuristic.
I exclusively used Facebook for family (years ago before deleting it) and received recommendations of otherwise socially-unconnected roommates who habitually accessed FB through house wifi.
I don't think that they'd go as far as scanning mailboxes, the return on the effort doesn't seem worth it. More likely the person you were connected to added you to an address book (or perhaps their mailer added you automatically) as someone they have dealt with before. Some anti-spam measures use a source address existing in a connected addressbook as a whitelisting clue.
To be fair, it's more likely they just looked you up on FB.
I'll bite. When I worked there I didn't see the management as idealistic, but the news media vis a vis the employee base had a lot of power. Many times I saw fiery journalism create direct confrontations between Zuck and ordinary employees about things like the company's moderation reaction to the shocking "napalm girl" wartime photo. Back then employees often won, creating shifts on company policy that felt like would not have happened otherwise. At some point it seems that the company decided that it wanted its people to have less of that kind of power though, presumably because it created a liberal company and Zuck seems to see the idea of Facebook as a liberal entity as a serious threat to his company
> Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names
No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable.
> Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social graph". (see Cambridge analytica, although actually its much more smoke and mirrors than you might imagine)
They needed to cut down that access because 1) they'd been told to 2) they realised that people could extract that data for free, thus denting their analytics advantage that made advertising so lucrative.
>FB was a much better product
FB used to have granular privacy controls and no "feed" -- you wrote on someone's wall, they wrote on yours, and people had to actively click on your profile to see the messages rather than have them thrust front and center.
FB abandoned that commitment to privacy and has suffered as a result.
How has Facebook suffered? Most of their losses seem to be self imposed, stuff like the "metaverse"
Amazon? FB was always a lot more evil.
Amazon just build the best logistics network on the planet and leverages this for their monopoly.
FB pushed fake news and everyting else without consideration as long as it grabs your attention which they then sell.
>the idealistic Twitter
Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same.
>Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names
That was (and is) a fantastic feature, and I remember being aware of it when I signed up. It was super easy to meet people in real life then find them on Facebook, and then invite them to future events in real life or keep track of what they're up to.
Also Myspace allowing HTML resulted in a bunch of entirely unreadable pages. And the Myspace extended friend network didn't really work because everyone was friends with Myspace Tom (who by all means seems to be a chill guy IRL)
>Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.
If anything, Facebook was too friendly to third party devs (which does track with your comparison with Amazon, which I think is far too friendly to third party sellers). Third party apps are anti-features IMO. Should've just stuck to its core functionality, connecting you with people you know, and showing you content from groups that you have chosen to join (which you can still get in your newsfeed if you aggressively block and hide almost everything, which I do lol)
> Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start
I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys of a Nokia or Motorola phone. It was delightful. You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
Facebook was something you did on your computer. There were lots of ads and they had just launched the algorithmic news feed. It was the beginning of something bad IMHO.
I think I got an account in late 2007 or 2008, so perhaps it was different in 2006 or early 2007. But I do remember in 2009, Ashton Kutcher was in the news for having a million followers on Twitter, so the time where it was not for celebrity gossip was certainly brief.
I also generally prefer not to be notified by things on my phone if I can avoid it, computer use is more deliberate.
>You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.
But I certainly knew all the people I was friends with on Facebook, they were people I first met in person, and it had their names.
I think fundamentally, I dislike the asymmetric nature of "following" people on Twitter (or Instagram or whatever). On Facebook you are friends or you are not. Obviously you can hide/mute people or whatever but the fundamental interaction is mutual.
IIRC, early twitter really felt like it was there to provide content you wanted.
It was different at the start.
Back then, it was always different at the start. This was when digital services were built with the service, not exit, in mind.
Or maybe it's just me looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? Yet I really feel the rot wasn't always there, it set in over time and eventually encompassed all. Today, I pretty much assume that any new service is an exit-seeking scam until proven otherwise; I don't remember having much reason for that 15 years ago.
Agreed, a lot of companies I can make an argument for believe in many being "idealistic" at some point. (admittedly I'm using "idealistic" as a very wide ranging concept here)
Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.
> and other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) as far as I can tell it's never really had any mission other than getting big.
I sometimes wonder what motivations these orgs have in contributing to open source.
My cynical side refuses to believe that the reasons are altruistic (although I'm sure there are altruistic individuals in those orgs!).
I think that the decisions to contribute to open source are calculated business decisions made to benefit the organization by:
* Getting outside contributions to the software that's widely used inside an organization
* Getting more people familiar with the software so that when they're hired they are already up to speed
* Attracting talent
* Improving PR
* Undermining competition (Llama?)
Regardless of the reasons, I think that there's a huge net benefit to society from large companies open-sourcing their software. I just don't think that's an argument to view these companies more favorably.
> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess)
Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves
At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.
And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".
> At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.
Of course not. GraphQL has vastly simplified our backend development, and has also resulted in better coordination between backend and frontend teams. There are so many things which GraphQL gets right - TYPES and schemas, traversing entity relationships, selectively querying fields, builtin API explorer etc. We use REST only for super trivial projects.
I'm more of an ops person and had the misfortune having to assist an inherited Drupal/static site generator project that heavily used GraphQL. It was not fun to debug this crap, and that is my biggest issue - as if the SSG setup itself isn't already a pain in the ass, adding GraphQL to the build stack was just the icing on the cake.
(One of the issues the dev team faced was the insane amount of RAM that was consumed by the GraphQL crap in both the FE and BE containers, which was a pain to debug for the FE side because that was an ephemeral container on an EKS environment)
IMHO, GraphQL entices developers on both ends to just be lazy and throw the complexity to the other team, and Ops who has to support both teams and mediate between both sides who just blame the other side for being too dumb.
I think React and GraphQL are pretty impressive in terms of how shitty they've made the developer experience at so many companies. GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
> GraphQL especially seems to attract the kind of people who love to misuse technologies built for massive orgs in companies with fewer than 100 employees.
This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes
This is the classic example of the quote:
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses
That explains some of the experiences ive seen at small companies! From my pov it was "design-by-resume." People wanted to play w tech for their next job, with less concern for what the business needed.
There's actually a well-known effect in standards, that large orgs want to overcomplicate them, as having implemented a bunch of overcomplicated standards becomes part of their moat against competitors. This is definitely done deliberately; the most blatant example is Office Open XML but it's true of others too. They know that they have the staff to waste effort on it, and others don't.
I'm not sure anyone is thinking 'lets open source our most dumb ideas to hobble potential competition' - but they would do it if they thought of it.
> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic?
That’s how Zuckerberg painted it, and no doubt there were people who bought it, at least internally. See the red book.
https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook
>Zuckerberg's Law: The amount each person shares double each year.
Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false. I (and most people I know) are posting ("sharing") less and less. Faced with a surveillance panopticon, I think many normal people are opting out. Peer-to-peer networks are withering.
The internet is reverting to the format of traditional media, with two distinct classes of broadcasters ('influencers') and audience members.
> Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false.
That law exists at least since 2008, over a decade and a half ago. It’s plausible it was true and born from observation at the time. The first Snowden documents were published half a decade later, in 2013.
The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.
> if you tell people that politicians lie
If you do it as a blanket statement — i.e. all politicians lie all the time — then yes, I will be pretty irritated.
Some politicians spout dangerous nonsense most of the time.
Other politicians can be trusted most of the time, and when they lie it tends towards 'spin' or 'being economical with the truth' (such as: "we are spending more on education than ever before" — when this is true in nominal/absolute terms but false in real/per-pupil terms).
There is a world of difference between these positions, and treating them alike (as many do) undermines democracies.
I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either.
Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.
I mean, you're both probably correct.
In the US a huge portion of the population doesn't vote, I would expect those that think every politician is a crook.
The other side that does vote thinks the other politician lies and their politician is the good one.
Many mix up what politicians want to do with what they can do.
Lies, to many, are better than being alone in a dark and cold universe. Please tell me my worst fears and psychological hang-ups are not true.
It was also born by the guy - Zuck and arguably in a similar spirit - who initially created a hot or not webpage to rank female college classmates by "fuckability". No clue how any of this would come as a surprise if you know his history.
Brian Cantrill talks about how social media was born crocked [1] while referring to the eerily similar friendster backstory.
[1] https://youtu.be/0wtvQZijPzg?t=482
There was plenty of koolaid around.
https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook
I more or less agree with a lot of whaat you wrote, but I'd argue for an ostensibly personal social network, real names are mostly a positive.
> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic?
People who work there often seem to (or at least used to years ago), though I could never really figure out why.
I remember de people graph search when no privacy settings really existed and people kept complete and updated profiles. It was the ultimate stalker took. Absolute batshit crazy that it existed even for the short time it did.
> It had the best network effect because of its real name policy
I think it was the best network effect because it started as an elite network in US universities and propagated from there.
> Has anyone ever seen Facebook as idealistic?
During the "Arab Spring" [0], a lot of people thought Facebook was the dogs bollocks and that the sun shone out of Mark Zuckerberg's arse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring
Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people.
There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want.
As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel).
As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774
Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...
I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, spiritually toxic shit:
> Wynn-Williams’ critiques aren’t limited to Zuckerberg. She describes the working culture under Sandberg as so intense that Wynn-Williams felt pressured to send her talking points while in labor, her feet in stirrups.
My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever expect to be working. The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.
I think the second take is more likely. And even if we think it's bizarre that someone could get to the point where they believe that kind of devotion to their job is necessary, it's still alarming and raises red flags that a company culture could cause someone to get to the point that they'd feel that way.
I am inclined to agree with you but I do have a bit of nuance to add. Pretty sure this is not going to be a popular opinion but I think the second POV you present is apt but dependant on hierarchy level as well as each individual's drive to succeed.
From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life and work, no one will do it for you. I am all for supporting employees on all levels (and sure her superior could and should have done some things differently) but if your aspirations and perseverance get you to the point where you are flirting with the C suite, you should also be aware the you own your decisions now.
On the other hand, if you are that far in, that you are "flirting with the C suite", it is almost impossible not to have knowledge about you having joined a data gobbling sect/mafia, that will eat you up alive, if you upset them. So while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.
> while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does.
I don't understand. In my world view, owning your decisions includes understanding the paths those decisions might lead to and finding your ~piece~peace with that.
EDIT: s/piece/peace/
> EDIT: s/piece/peace/
This is a minor typo whose real intent was still understandable, you fixed it right away, and no one had replied yet. Adding the fake strike through and edit note makes your post a bit harder and more inconvenient to read with no advantage. You can just edit it in place, there would be no harm to it.
You're completely right. It is an annoyance in this site to see people listing very small edits as if something important was happening.
>flirting with the C suite
It sounds like one of the issues was that the C-Suite flirted with her
>Wynn-Williams also writes that Kaplan, as her boss, made inappropriate comments to her, including repeatedly asking where she was bleeding from after childbirth. She writes that, shortly after he called her sultry in front of other co-workers, Kaplan ground into her on a dance floor. She triggered an investigation into Kaplan and writes that she was “almost immediately” retaliated against with a cut in duties before eventually being fired. Wynn-Williams describes the investigation as a “farce.”
If you have a job at Facebook today, you can get an impressive job somewhere else tomorrow. Nobody should be that connected.
If Sandberg was a man it would not have happened.
Woman-on-Woman violence in the workplace has to stop, instead of trying to constantly take each other down they need to be better allies to other women.
Especially true for those that aspire to be role models for successful women and write books about how to "Lean In".
I am sorry, but this attitude is sexist. My allies are those I can relate to, those which I can cooperate with. I don't pick my allies based on gender, and nor should you. And you shouldn't coerce anyone into forming alliances based on gender. It is the person that matters, not their gender or race or whatever other random attribute.
Its sexism all the way down - Sandberg would not have done that to a male subordinate (who's wife was giving birth) and a male boss would not have done that to Wynn-Williams.
Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.
Plenty of men get asked to do work that takes them away from their families, including at special events.
Controversial, but shouldn't be: men are on average better at standing up for themselves and saying "no".
I'm not sure whether men are truly better on average, or women are just on average more conditioned by our societies not to do so or even if, to do so in a manner that isn't effective.
Unlearning ~2 decades of upbringing, education, expectations, some of that from religion, etc when entering the workforce could be pretty hard and significantly affect any statistics around this.
It isn't violence. Stop this stupid hyperbole. Violence is a real term. Don't water it down.
“Violence” means “to damage or adversely affect” and includes psychological harm. This is recognised by dictionaries.
Yes, the Newspeak dictionaries.
I agree don’t trivialize violence. Sending an email or txt to asking for some talking points is not violent.
I don’t think anyone reasonably thinks that’s what the poster was saying. Presumably the violence is in creating the type of work environment where you are so oppressed or manipulated that you feel immense pressure to reply in that situation.
If you’re checking your work email and replying to it during labour, I somehow doubt you feel like you were being “asked” and respected as a human being.
But I don’t know the full story from all parties, and I get the feeling you don’t either. I wasn’t judging this particular case in my previous reply, merely pointing out that violence can take many forms and we shouldn’t narrow our thinking of what it means to do harm.
I agree for something like a McDonalds employee or even entry level software engineer but this is a senior managerial role at Facebook. Nobody needs to do this job. Unless your spending is out of control you do not need this income. So if it comes with unreasonable demands, I don’t really care. There are problems worth caring about and this ain’t one of them.
What the leadership does will be mirrored down to the grunt. I have never lead a multi billion dollars corporation but from my view if your team can discard someone easily, they can also bear not having that person around for two weeks. Or a year.
Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.
In an alternative version of reality, she would be so distracted, that she failed to give birth and the child died as a consequence of her being completely absorbed in a toxic work culture. That alternative version of reality would be completely believable, and probably many would not be more surprised than now reading this news. This tells us all we need to know about FB.
> The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working.
Honestly, they need to grow a pair
This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries
You're a top-level executive and you're afraid of being let go by such a silly thing? They can't wait 2 or 3 days for "top level bullet points"? Seems like they depend on you more than you depend on them
Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious.
She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it was of the utmost importance to have this level of committment. The book probably reads similar to those books of someone who leaves their church or cult.
They tend to have cult dynamics because the people who subscribe to the cult dynamics are the ones who get promoted. If you’re happy to just make a living as a software engineer instead of trying to propel your way up the ladder of the world’s richest companies then you can live very happily and comfortably.
Yes, but this is not the people they'll hire for this kind of job. They're looking for the batshit crazy that will do this kind of stuff. This is the reason for the psychological profile they do in lieu of interview, when hiring managers.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. These cowards are ruining workplaces everywhere by having no backbone and subjecting their subordinates to the whims of psychopathic leaders.
Edit: it’s OK Meta employees. The best time to quit was years ago, the second best time is today.
At least they were not sleeping under their desks to stroke Musks's egomania.
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."
Don't foget the less visible guys (yes, it's a gender issue ;) like Thiel, Andreeeesssssen etc
It's Facebook though - I can not think of a lower stakes workplace.
Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.
It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries.
I don't think the stakes are that low.
> website that can influence elections in major countries,
I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over.
The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't actually make), videos of random nonsense like dogs taking care of toddlers and behaving like humans etc.
FB has become AI slop no man's land.
I don't even understand how facebook continues to operate at this point.
I think people still use FB because it given them something to feel better. In Twitter/X you see all kinds of bad things happening, but in FB they sign up for groups that send only the things they like to see (most of that being fake, anyway).
> this sort of power transferred to twitter
Twitter is not the place where the masses are being influenced. Especially outside the US, as in most other countries Twitter barely found adoption outside of tech and journalist circles.
The majority of voting people (= old people) are still on Facebook. And besides Facebook, Meta also own Instagram. Meta is definitely the single company with the most encompassing political influence tool, should it choose to use it.
> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?!
Do you want your job still?
sure you can take "holiday", but if you don't please your capricious master, you'll not have a job to come back to.
I can well believe that Sandberg is someone who lacks empathy of her immediate underlings, the mission comes first after all.
Blaming victims for the abuse they suffer is a common theme in modern society.
The fact she felt she could not turn her phone off without there being consequences is the core point here.
At a certain point ones unwillingness to accept consequences is capitulation pure and simple and it is what allows people to continue to behave shittily. Takes 2 to tango.
None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.
Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.
Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.
I didn't say the products are trash because of who is at the helm of the companies. They are just bad compared to alternatives. Period.
> just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad.
And just because that product does something you need doesn't mean it's not trash. GP didn't say "all cloud, all social media, all cars". Heck, literal trash is not all trash, people throw away a lot of good stuff.
Many people thought Tesla cars are diamond studded trash since Musk was still an idol. And it was pretty objective, great motor/battery surrounded by bargain bin components.
> just because you don't like the person...
Do we need that person to keep having the product though?
> Most people don't give two fraks...
They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone.
But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship?
The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a scale never seen before. Is that an issue?
Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?
Maybe these public platforms would better serve the people using them without the person running/ruining/most associated with the brand?
Maybe?
I'm first to argue that, past certain size, social media platforms become de-facto town squares / utilities, and should be treated as such. But, until they are...
> Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?
... until they are, it's kind of the core axiom behind capitalism and market economy and social order in most places around the world, that this is his money, and if he wants to be "squandering the resulting cash on" (according to you) "asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse", it's his prerogative.
Sure, currently Zuck can do anything he wants with the money he gets from the users in his cage.
We should really open the cage though. Can you imagine being able to call people only on your mobile network, or being able to send e-mail only to people using the same e-mail provider?
Yet we accept only being able to connect with, share photos and posts, message, subscribe to people on the same social platform as you are.
If we can define a technical specification for exchanging social data, and enforce that the platforms above certain size implement it, Zuck won't even have the cash to dump on Metaverse. Every platform can then have their own algorithmic feed so you can chose your own echo chamber.
The moat is only good the Zucks of the world. It absolutely sucks for everyone else.
> Because your opinion is wrong.
I was having a strong argument/discussion yesterday with a friend who is a communist. A real "I want hammer and sickle" kinda guy. He owns two homes, works for big-pharma, his wife works for big-logistic, scuba-diving vacations across the planet, very 'communist' way of life.
His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'. His/her/our/their (not pronouns, just groups of people) are different to ours. They got a different vision of this world (which of course it costs them nothing - until Communism settles and they are beheaded for having two homes, SP500 investments, and going scuba-diving across the planet!!)
> Most people don't give two fraks
"What are you talking about dude?? I got all these Gmail, and OneDrive, and Webex stuff for free!! It's like modern day communism!!" /s
This post is such a cocktail of confusion with a dash of McCarthyism that I have to say thank you for existing, and keeping the torch of this muddled thinking all the way from the post-war period.
Thank you for never learning what communism means, for staying embattled and internalising the narrative, for your anecdotes about your rich friend who doesn't realize that communists are lurking out there, waiting to kill him and everyone with wealth, once they get in power.
I'd ask you to never change, but I know that you won't, you'll paint your future thoughts through the same stencil that I've heard and seen so many times. When you express this it feels like I get a taste of the real America, a trailer park with the metheads, the uncle that just got back from jail, educating his young nephew about how the world works.
"You see son, there are rich people and they are good. And there are bad folks called communists that are jealous and want to kill the good rich folks. Be sure to carry your gun with you and if you see any of them communists, shoot them up. Because we will be rich one day. God bless America."
>a friend who is a communist.
>His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'.
Yes they are. Communism is obviously wrong. Are you joking?
Stop watching brainrot reels dude :D
That's a very naive take, not using their products doesn't stop them from negatively impacting society. Look at what Musk is doing over the whole world (and the other two aren't much better, just not as obvious about it). It's not about being fair or jealous or whatever, a single individual having so much wealth and thus power is simply not healthy for society.
The problem is these companies buy competitors or bribe hardware/platforms in order to get market monopoly. So often it's impossible to find alternative products.
You cannot avoid FB. They literally stalk you everywhere and sell your info to advertisers. You are their product whether you like it or not.
It’s easy to delete your account though. They may still track you, but you’re not feeding the attention machine.
It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.
You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace hosts file, add firewall on your Android and block ad broker, doubleclick, adjust, mopub, google analytics, etc. etc (loooooong list).
Surveillance capitalism is not going anywhere. Where money can be made, money will be made.
> It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do.
Firstly, this is just not true. Like basically all users who couldn't be mapped to a FB person were given userid=0, which I guess is a shadow account, but it's pretty crap as a method of tracking people. Source: worked at FB for half a decade.
I do all that, and don't use any Facebook products. It's not so hard, and has the benefit (to some) of never being invited to a WhatsApp group.
Have you tried figuring it out? It's not magic or miracle, there are reasons why they're profitable and if it's not obvious you might get surprised and learn something if you try to study it.
One reason is that they are extremely manipulative and strategically exploit people with power over other people's money, notably taxes and what labour generates.
They are super profitable because of the naivety of their customers and for that you can't blame the companies themselves.
Do you think fraud ought to be legal?
Boycotts might work occasionally but they are often not enough.
These kinds of amoral corporate hierarchies will by their nature promote people who give themselves over entirely to the business. It's not that everyone who works there turns into that kind of corporate drone, it just weeds out the people who value more of a work/life balance. If someone is willing to send talking point while they're in labour, a company with the corporate culture of Facebook isn't going to stop them, they're going to be rewarded.
It's not just about one individual pushing for more... it's the entire system that values work over personal well-being and creates an environment where people feel they can't step away, even during life-changing events.
> Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...
There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.
There is a whole industry in the US to celebrate that some people are getting richer. And it is literally funded by some of the richest people in that list.
Or have a tax bracket after which you pay 100%.
The more I learn about Sandberg the more I think she's actually psychotic
> Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Might it be an option that correlation and causation are reversed here?
Given the amount of criticsm a typical leader of a large company, or even a country, gets these days, it is no wonder that people with narcissistic traits have an advantage. Somewhat more empathetic people would've given up already, either when they received a large enough reward, or whenever they got serious criticsm on bad practices.
Free tip for a better society: stop worshipping success.
>Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...
What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?
Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".
Presumably this is intended to lead into an argument that because we disagree on exactly where the limit should be we shouldn’t have a limit at all. We could make the same case against drunk driving, speed limits, age of consent laws, maximum sentencing…
Yeah, I don't know why we would need a limit, I'm sure if a temper tantrum devolves into one of them building their own robo army. The others will follow suit and it will all just balance itself out.
Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten.
Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.
It is definitely not healthy.
But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it.
Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators.
What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
Then the people who punish those in power will gain too much power.
The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.
Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.
There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term. I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.
Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.
There is no solution.
Somewhat similar to Paul Graham's essay _Inequality and Risk_[1]:
> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.
> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?
[1] https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
This is a convenient cover because it allows people to convert a measurable and fairly concrete thing into a more vague and flexible thing. Suddenly, all somebody needs to do is make a claim that what they are doing isn't corruption and they are off the hook. They'll be hypothetical billionaires that are the problem, but never any actual action.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.
I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.
Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.
Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?
I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".
Power can be diffused. Wealth accumulation is power concentration. When it's legal to buy politicians then what is corruption? How can you go after corruption when those with power define what is corruption?
Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.
One question is why communism is a problem. It is a problem because it is a totalitarian regime. I.e., a non-democratic government. I am not sure limiting peoples wealth is the actual problem with communism.
Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.
'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.
>But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism
I'll have "Everything I don't like is communism" for 500, Alex.
Ever heard of this little-known thing called taxes?
Particularly, progressive taxation and wealth taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax
>What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
Wealth isn't power.
Obscene accumulation of wealth is abuse of power in and of itself.
You can limit people's wealth and it's not communism. If it was communism then they wouldn't have any wealth at all. A limit would just be democratic capitalism with a limit. There's no rule in capitalism that says you can't be taxed, or that the taxes couldn't be designed to approach a wealth limit. It's an economic system, not an entire governmental and social handbook.
There are several faults with this reasoning. Capital attracts capital, and with too low of marginal taxes, it pools at the top, increasing wealth inequality, hurting the non-elite's ability to compete, and squeezes the middle class. To say marginal taxes is communism is just wrong.
Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.
Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.
> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)
This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.
> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.
Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.
And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).
The imperfections of 'big' people have much more ramifications than the imperfections of 'small' people. Humans work best together in much more egalitarian groups where the imperfections of individuals are compensated by the strengths of other individuals.
You probably don't have an issue with limiting government power. Why is limiting an individual reaching power of governments so difficult to fathom?
The problem is power accumulation, "small" people have a harder time limiting my freedoms by abusing their power.
I don't want a king, whether they got to be king by swords or money.
> What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?
In democracy, the maximum should be 1. One vote per person. That's it.
In practice, we can delegate stuff, but I don't see reason why should people (as adults) accept any sort of authoritarianism in their lives.
I don't know what the maximum wealth should be, but I do know that it is lower than one billion dollars. So let's start there.
Billionaires are bad for society.
> Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".
Still, I've never seen a poor human becoming an oligarch.
The problem is not that those billionaires are not perfect, rather that they have too much power.
> Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos...
People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!
Tuvalu has a GDP of $70 million. Is that the line?
It is a very small country.
You're trying pretty hard to miss the point here.
Honestly that seems high enough, yeah.
She said Wynn-Williams’ allegations about Kaplan are false, and in a Thursday statement, she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process.
(emph, mine)
This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.
I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers?
Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?
I mean if you're publishing a book, especially a tell-all one, you'd go and talk to sources familiar with the matter who can independently verify whether the statements are true or not to shield you against defamation lawsuits.
Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit
Wikipedia is the gold standard. Good enough is asking Grok.
A Youtuber I follow got in an argument a couple of days ago with someone who kept claiming the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 was primarily voluntary (not by force or a response to threats to their safety). The Youtuber kept asking him for sources (providing his own to the contrary), and the contrarian kept, I shit you not, asking Grok and then citing Grok as his source.
We are fucked.
I’ve seen people smugly post ChatGPT screenshots without commentary with the intent of ending a conversation in a “I’m right and this proves it” way.
Of course, the wronger the answer is the more likely they are to have that attitude.
My goodness, the audacity.
It was fact checked: in Texas
> skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process."
And the industry in question has compromised its host culture. What is Truth now?
This billionaire corporate sociopath suggested "Facebook remake the news ecosystem with the company at its center."
How is the corporate propaganda business working out socially and politically? I see the stock valuations — perhaps they are a measure of what has been lost in stability and community.
> "I’ve seen him face so many choices and lose touch with whatever fundamental human decency"
Including the rush to dismantle fact-checking in his corporation's product, which has become THE news source for millions of citizens.
> she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process.”
Why don't we let the community decide, instead of these bureaucratic, free speech-chilling "fact checkers"? If it's good enough for your employer, it should be good enough for you.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/07/nx-s1-5251151/meta-fact-check...
A dupe of my comment from another post on this (relating to the US arbiter ruling that she may not promote the book https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351949)
People may be interested in the interview with Wynn-Williams (the whistleblower) on the News Agents podcast: https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/episodes/7DrpKCA/ (it's a UK news/political podcast very popular in the UK). From what they said at the beginning I think this is her first big podcast interview about the book/her claims. I wonder if she chose a UK podcast because of the US arbiter ruling.
She also did an interview with BI "hours before an arbitrator ruled in Meta's favor" https://www.businessinsider.com/former-meta-executive-sarah-...
Don't worry Zuckerberg is a free speech crusader. She can post all her criticism directly on Facebook and it won't be removed, whether it is true or not.
Oh Facebook is taking her to court to block her speech? Hmmm..
This triggers my cautionary nerve a bit. I think it is important to recognize that she wants to sell a book.
I am not saying she isn't doing this because she has a cause. I am also not saying she is lying or anything.
But if you sell a book you can't deny that there might be a conflict of interest. Potentially she paints things more extreme than they really were.
What makes more money, working at Facebook in an executive role or putting out a book that people might hear about but almost certainly won't buy?
I don't see these types of books as business opportunities.
Selling an exaggerated or untrue story about powerful people also opens one up to expensive legal processes and consequences.
All else aside Zuck was basically a kid when the whole Facebook rocket ship ride took off. Nobody is their best self all day every day. Personally I always thought he came over as kind of an asshole but you have to keep hit pieces like these in the right frame. The shortest accurate answer to what's Zuck like is "I never met him" the rest is just clicks and hot air.
But the author here worked with him directly for years, the article recounts several personal interactions that went weird. You haven't met him, neither have I, but the person we're talking about certainly has.
Are you really saying that first hand evidence of Zuck’s character is irrelevant to our understanding of him because it relates to a period when he was relatively young? We can’t use that together with his more recent actions to create a more complete picture of his character and motivations. That biographies should all start at age 30?
Sounds like a disgruntled social justice warrior. I avoid such people at all costs. They quickly make the environment extremely toxic!
The fact that Meta is aggressively trying to suppress the book just reinforces the point. If it were all "misleading and unfounded," they wouldn't need to fight this hard to bury it.
That’s not true. Just look at the current climate. If I repeat lies often enough, people will repeat the same lies and start to believe.
That's a fair point, repetition can make falsehoods stick. But if the book were full of outright lies, Meta could challenge it with clear evidence rather than legal pressure
Or actually sue.
They repeatedly claim (in the article) that the allegations are "old news". That isn't a denial.
Can anyone answer this question, assuming its answerable:
if they signed a mutual non-disparagement agreement, and they are currently using that agreement to stop a publication, if meta goes and breaks that agreement, doesn't that nullify the contract?
Hahahahahaha, sore over losing in Ticket to Ride and Catan. Those aren’t even “serious” games.
In addition to it all, Zuck's taste in board games is basic.
Though he's still ahead of Elon, who was busted for boosting his Path of Exile 2 account.
I want Elon to play EVE Online, it'll be a shitshow for him
This place worships Zuck because he apparently “open sourced” AI. It’s the most ridiculous narrative on its own but we also live in the most absurd moment in history.
1. I hate these "click-and-hold" "bot" "detectors" that takes 6, 7 seconds or longer to complete.
2. Making me do it three times in a row is just obnoxious.
blame perimeterx
What's a surprise, a guy who has stolen startup from Winklevoss brothers and had to settle the case in the court has a "brutal image". Who would've expected that!
Aut Zuck, aut nihil.
> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic?
In my experience they were react coders
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer and not having non-questionable morals. I can make up different stuff about how a ceo can be amoral, and those would still apply to zuck / {{ whoelse }} book meant to be sold at airports for bored people. non-story.
This is probably true if you look at all big tech companies, but before Windows, MacOS, Oracle Databases or IBM computers did not have the responsibility of dealing with the communication and shaping of world view of billions of people world wide.
It's the same as owning a large share of news papers or TV channels. You own the public discourse.
If Larry Ellison is a greedy immoral bastard I switch to MS SQL Server, or something open source. When Zuckerberg or Musk became greedy immoral bastards, they started to shape the information fed to the world. You can decide not to buy a Tesla, but you cannot escape the results of brainwashing of other people that vote.
Bill Gates had serious trouble for including a free Internet Browser in his Operating System, because he was not able to influence the public discourse. The new internet mass communication companies do. Google never really got into much trouble while their monopoly was stronger.
I know your comment isn't about Elon specifically and I have my own reservations about some of what he does, but it's important to point out (and maybe this depends on what you call "misinformation", it shapes all future discussion) that Twitter absolutely was censoring for partisan reasons (before he bought it; I know some have complained Musk does indeed ban his critics) including silencing covid dissent, real doctors and researchers getting kicked off. Him acquiring it was absolutely necessary to break the deadlock
Edit: We do not want our platforms to be owned by someone like Susan Wojcicki who inflated her own importance and who thought mass censorship is ok (Google has really abrogated their responsibility here)
The censorship hasn’t reduced under Elon, who it’s directed at has changed.
Everything is not partisan it might be political. The Republican vs. Democratic is hurting the US badly you can not continue to make everything ok just because you need the support from whatever extreme views is populist in your party.
Most of the things a party does is not extreme but you guys are going insane over there.
The twittefiles nothingburger?
Sorry not sorry, but that was no "nothingburger." The fact of the matter was that Twitter under Jack Dorsey had become completely bloated and abusive. You had people working there whose only job was to do things like manipulate pixels in emojis and more seriously, they had created a vast and cancerous DEI bureaucracy.
Guses the government is also that? You're choking on that coolaid.
Seems like historical founders/CEOs like e.g. Hewlett and Packard were relatively decent people despite being immensely successful.
So at least it was possible back in the day (of course after this many years a lot of details were lost and overall standards and expectations were very different back then).
> you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer
This is nonsense. Plenty of good people are wildly successful. The difference is they aren’t addicted to the role, and so see a future for themselves beyond it. Connecting with that future self, in turn, effects their decisions today—at work, at home, in society.
We have a cadre of sociopaths leading our commercial giants. That is a fixable problem. Saying it’s a non-story is just being nihilistic and lazy.
Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility.
It did not work out that well for the OpenAi board however.
> Boards have a lot to answer for, and in theory at least, this is their responsibility
Boards have plenty of things they're properly responsible for. CEO sociopathy isn't one of them, especially not if it's the profitable type of assholery. The regulation has to come from outside.
How do you legally stop extremely ambitious sociopaths from obtaining positions of power?
> you don't become a global ceo without being an absolute killer
This idea is very parochial and American, and it's unfortunate in spreading a wrong idea that gives license for some people to behave as hooligans.
There are massive global companies most of us have never heard of, with CEOs who shun publicity and operate in what is really a mild-mannered but highly competent fashion.
Power also comes from politeness, tact, diplomacy, and the earned attachment of subordinates we call "respect".
They are not constantly immersed in scandal and drama because most of the employees never have much cause to interact negatively.
The cult of US Tech leaders is a vile and embarrassing spectacle of vanity, tantrums, acting-out, histrionics and arrogance. It's very poor human behaviour that harms the perception of business in the wider world, and we should not hold it up as normative.
What's up, old baits like "ZUCKERBERG TRIED TO STOP THIS BOOK" don't work anymore?
On a different note; it's funny how otherwise reasonable people (on HN but also in general) become stereotypical gossiping girls whenever there's expose on %famous_person% or a cheap ideological position to have fun with. Woah, corporate America sure rewards the fucked-up people! We do, indeed, live in a society. Chirp chirp
yet you participate in society. curious! i am very intelligent
Yes, well, she was fired. I'm sure she's completely unbiased.
If it was so bad, why did she work there? She was a senior executive, not a wage-slave.
I unfortunately agree with this take, but her (probably) being a crappy person and looking to monetize her experience is exactly why she worked there and there is likely a lot of truth there under her bias.
Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.
So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.
We still haven't found out how to use the internet to socialize, without resorting to giving power to a central entity.
If there is something out there that can do this, profitably, then we can kiss these mega social giants good bye.
I heard about the Blue Sky protocol, but it still feels primitive.
You realize people (including me) were socializing on the internet before any of these big companies existed, right?
Most people weren’t, until the big companies came around and commoditized it.
There was this open protocol (that still exists!) called IRC. Also: Usenet and email.
Facebook has 3 billion users. IRC and Usenet basically round to zero by comparison.
Email is the real answer here, but the reason it is better is the same reason Facebook et al took over.
We also still do it!
_Centralized platforms_ socialising happened around 2004, Facebook being one big survivor of that time. Because then, centralising stuff to provide a massive service proved more efficient (money wise: resources, investment, control, ads).
But socialising on the internet? There were plenty of options before, around and after then. Only, they didn't get the same support, convergence and effort since then. Because most people trusted the centralized services would opt to do the right things eventually. Ha. Fools were we.
Not really surprised. It's good to have more people talking about how these people act out of the public eye. But all of this makes me a little less optimistic, and just reminds me that powerful people are rarely held accountable for all the messed up stuff they do.
My conception of world conquering ambition comes mostly from popular media so trying to imagine Zuckerberg trying to become the world's stenographer through a platform that is 90% boomer-bait AI slop is a bit disorienting.
After all what Meta did? Who could have thought. And yet people love to upload photos of their children on pedobook.
"Joel Kaplan, had sexually harassed her. ... and Kaplan, the company’s newly appointed president of global affairs;"
Nominative determinism?
--
On a different note, Obama, the ex-president with theoretically no official power, is calling up CEOs privately to get them to behave differently?
Seems like the Twitter files weren't the only corporate being influenced
> On a different note, Obama, the ex-president with theoretically no official power, is calling up CEOs privately to get them to behave differently?
The article's phrasing was a bit murky, but I read that to mean that Obama called after or around the 2016 election, while he was still president.
> On a different note, Obama, the ex-president with theoretically no official power, is calling up CEOs privately to get them to behave differently?
Then its a private citizen calling someone in their network. standard 1st amendment stuff right
If its making a speech about it in public, again perfectly above board.
Threatening to use executive power in private, very much not.
However the USA is arresting people for organising protests, so that whole freedom of speech thing has gone a bit stale, alas.