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.

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".

https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

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.

On the first page after signing up, it wanted me to "Add some Friends", and suggested a bunch of people I knew. Including my cousin with a different last name, and who lived several states away.

I've always been fairly privacy conscious, always using an adblocker, but that was downright creepy.

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.

E.g. for a dating situation: new WhatsApp contact, growing frequency of texts, growing frequency of WhatsApp calls, culminating in a night where both phones were connected to the same SSID / locatable in one geo-location throughout the whole night, without their users checking them.

When that happens it'd be time to show them ads with the text "Your new love interest is highly interested in these products"...

It'd also be "amusing" to big-data the whole thing and get the computer to spit out the answer to the question "Where is this relationship going?"

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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".

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.

(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.

This is almost exactly how I feel about Kubernetes

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

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.

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.

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

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.

So not only is Facebook historically engaging in creepy contact scraping, but when they finally do get the world connected (for various definitions) they don't even do a good job with that

The strong possibility Zuckerberg just doesn't care about people

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.

Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.

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.

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.

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)

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 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.

It was different at the start.

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.

That may have been late stage Twitter, but early stage twitter was _not_ that. It became _the_ (only) way to be able to get near real-time information on some unfolding event, usually by the people actually involved, and very useful in that regard. It facilitated realtime communications in a way that FB did not.

https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

Not Facebook... if there was some idealism it was way way before I found Facebook.

The title refers to a memoir, an autobiographical account of a time period in the author's life.

The word "idealism" refers to the author's idealism, not Facebook's. This is stated in the first sentence of the first chapter.

Idealism routinely causes people to see Facebook as something other than what the facts show.

People who work there often seem to (or at least used to years ago), though I could never really figure out why.

I think it was the best network effect because it started as an elite network in US universities and propagated from there.

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

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

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?!

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.

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.

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/

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.”

This doesn't excuse Sandberg at all, I'm sure she would be a horrifically bad person to work for. But when I read that section I immediately thought of highly ambitious people I've worked with who I could see on either side of that encounter. Such people often are highly materially successful, although most of them don't seem very happy about it.

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".

Women should not discriminate against women in the workplace because they are women.

Controversial, but shouldn't be: men are on average better at standing up for themselves and saying "no".

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.

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.

Honestly I feel that father and mothers getting back from a years parental leave usually comes back with better focus.

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.

Edit: it’s OK Meta employees. The best time to quit was years ago, the second best time is today.

Kind of reminds me of this Simpsons joke: "Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, and one to listen."

Should the photo grid be 3 wide or 5 wide... Thank god ChatGPT can now pump out the mindless talking points for them.

I don't think the stakes are that low.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

>His opinions (just as the parent-commenter) are not 'wrong'.

Yes they are. Communism is obviously wrong. Are you joking?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The fact she felt she could not turn her phone off without there being consequences is the core point here.

There should be a level of market cap where you company has to split, period. Megacorps create oligarchs, ruin competition and cheat antitrust.

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.

What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?

Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

> 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

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.

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".

On that note, trust-busting is also worth discussing as a counter to the modern concentration of wealth.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Billionaires are bad for society.

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.

People amassing more money than entire countries just should not happen. "Eat the rich"!

(emph, mine)

This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.

Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit

We are fucked.

Of course, the wronger the answer is the more likely they are to have that attitude.

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.

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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly820v99ppo

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq5zyq0250wo

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...

Oh Facebook is taking her to court to block her speech? Hmmm..

Though he's still ahead of Elon, who was busted for boosting his Path of Exile 2 account.

FWIW, Ticket to Ride and Catan are decent, worth playing, euro games. That's miles better than Monopoly or Risk which the casual folk immediately think of in the context of board games.

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?

Meta is trying to stop a former employee from promoting her book about Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43349473 - March 2025 (104 comments)

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.

I don't see these types of books as business opportunities.

This book prob wouldn't have even blipped my radar were it not for all of these stories about how they're trying to stop it.

“Over one dinner, Zuckerberg said Andrew Jackson — known for his populist appeal and his inhumane relocation of Native Americans — was America’s best president and “it’s not even close,” according to Wynn-Williams. ”

There are many reasons someone could have a person be a favorite president. It’s unfair to bring up the worst thing a president did in response to someone saying that this president or that president is their favorite.

For example I have liberal friends who say FDR is their favorite president. It would be unfair to say then “FDR known for throwing Japanese people in internment camps was the favorite president of Joe Smith!”

I have friends who say Obama was their favorite president. Imagine someone saying “Obama who killed thousands through drone attacks was the favorite president of Jane Smith!”

Anyway when it comes to Andrew Jackson specifically I had a libertarian friend in high school who was a big fan of him because he helped eliminate the Bank of the United States. I was in high school taking AP US History around the time Ron Paul was running for president so I believe my libertarian friend was connecting Ron Paul’s opposition to the Federal Reserve with Andrew Jackson’s anti Bank of US policies.

I don’t know why Zuckerberg likes Andrew Jackson so much. I wish the article had said it.

That is a very different thing than "favorite president" - that's someone who believes they're being objective, that there's no arguments to be made about what others should see as a simple fact.

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.

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)

Most of the things a party does is not extreme but you guys are going insane over there.

That's not her role. You should be policing the obvious stuff but not that, especially when none of it turns out to be misinformation. She absolutely abrogated her responsibility as CEO or even just being a decent person

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).

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.

It did not work out that well for the OpenAi board however.

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 limit their power. Musk has broken important rules and gotten away with it. Stop doing that. Zuckerberg and Facebook, meanwhile, should have been fined back into the single-digit billionaire category for the terror they’ve unleashed on our children.

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.

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.

Email is the real answer here, but the reason it is better is the same reason Facebook et al took over.

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.

But if he stole code, that's different

If he stole the rollout strategy (to selected universities first) that's also different

I don't know how much he actually took, only that there are IMs with really pleasant things like "I'm going to fuck them in the ear". And making outright fake accounts for the W twins