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Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

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Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#81

Post by golergka »

pavlov wrote: post #74
golergka wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I regret using the word "bullying" in my comment now. I do think that it is a correct word, but it's not what I wanted to argue about, and it completely derailed the conversation to a realm of value judgements. Can we talk about it without value judgements whatsoever, please? I don't think that we'll come to terms about who's a victim, who needs protection, and so on - but most of all, I think that these questions ar…

I'm genuinely not sure what you want to talk about if values and feelings are excluded. Your original comment calls HN an echo chamber and suggests that people who work at Apple, Uber and Palantir are afraid to express their political views. That's entirely about feelings. What specifically was it that you wanted to discuss there? Maybe it's not helpful to make a joke of it. But I honestly think it's a ridiculous not…

It seems that you confuse several loosely associated concepts as if they were the same thing called "discrimination". I think that it happens because you look at this, trying to determine, who's privileged and who's not, all in terms of value judgements - and that's absolutely not what I'm talking about. It's not about defending or attacking other people and their interests. It really doesn't matter if they're "discriminated against" or not - it's a stupid and loaded word that is used by everybody in a different way.

I only ask about things that matter personally to you. It's about your rational self-interest, and nobody else's. Do you want to be in an echo chamber where everybody has the same political opinion? Does it really benefit you? Does it benefit your political agenda to push out and silence your political opponents?

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#82

Post by phaus »

PunchTornado wrote: post #71

As an ex-fb employee I don't think fb did anything wrong and fb is just a scapegoat now. Media tries to blame brexit and trump on fb instead of realising that a large portion of the population actually want trump, brexit, no immigration, muslim bans etc. Hey, but it is easier to think that the people were tricked into voting like that.

I live in the rural South and although it may sound ridiculous to you, I've met more people here that believe all of the inflammatory, fake nonsense they read on FB than I have that don't. They use it as a primary source of news and they allow it to shape their view of the world and therefore their beliefs on certain political policies. While it's difficult to quantify with a specific percentage, there were absolutely a large number of people tricked, in the literal sense, into voting for Trump. These are the people that are Ill informed enough to think that women are certain to get raped by a pack of muslims if they ever try walking down a street anywhere in Europe.

Note: Surely this doesn't account for everyone that voted for Trump, but it is possible that it made enough of an impact to change the outcome.

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#84

Post by pavlov »

golergka wrote: post #81
pavlov wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely not sure what you want to talk about if values and feelings are excluded. Your original comment calls HN an echo chamber and suggests that people who work at Apple, Uber and Palantir are afraid to express their political views. That's entirely about feelings. What specifically was it that you wanted to discuss there? Maybe it's not helpful to make a joke of it. But I honestly think it's a ridiculous not…

It seems that you confuse several loosely associated concepts as if they were the same thing called "discrimination". I think that it happens because you look at this, trying to determine, who's privileged and who's not, all in terms of value judgements - and that's absolutely not what I'm talking about. It's not about defending or attacking other people and their interests. It really doesn't matter if they're "discr…

I still don't get what you're saying.

Your original comment talks about echo chambers and insinuates that people at Uber or Palantir "know better" than to discuss their political opinions.

Was that a good faith attempt to engage in discussion? What kind of response did you expect? How does it benefit you to come in and say the equivalent of "you all suck and wouldn't listen to me anyway"?

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#85

Post by golergka »

pavlov wrote: post #84
golergka wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you confuse several loosely associated concepts as if they were the same thing called "discrimination". I think that it happens because you look at this, trying to determine, who's privileged and who's not, all in terms of value judgements - and that's absolutely not what I'm talking about. It's not about defending or attacking other people and their interests. It really doesn't matter if they're "discr…

I still don't get what you're saying. Your original comment talks about echo chambers and insinuates that people at Uber or Palantir "know better" than to discuss their political opinions. Was that a good faith attempt to engage in discussion? What kind of response did you expect? How does it benefit you to come in and say the equivalent of "you all suck and wouldn't listen to me anyway"?

> Was that a good faith attempt to engage in discussion?

Yes.

> What kind of response did you expect?

Something like this.

> How does it benefit you to come in and say the equivalent of "you all suck and wouldn't listen to me anyway"?

I don't hope to change your mind. But I want to change the mind of all the people reading this thread.

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#86

Post by ashwinaj »

cornholio wrote: post #11

I think the way this problem is framed succumbs to an outdated world view, an image of the samurai computer hackers that put themselves in the service of the corporate lords - but are ultimately responsible for their actions against society and can choose to rebel. They are rare and prized and thus their collaboration is valued by the lords. This is a romantic vision that the companies themselves like to perpetuate,…

> They are not unique, precious snowflakes of rare skill, they are replaceable cogs in a machine that exists for a single purpose, profit

Totally agree

> Massive IT education programs now underway everywhere in the world will ensure that the corporations will have vast masses of foot soldiers so they can concentrate on what matters

Not yet, source most FB engineers get paid a lot.

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#87

Post by teaneedz »

PunchTornado wrote: post #71

As an ex-fb employee I don't think fb did anything wrong and fb is just a scapegoat now. Media tries to blame brexit and trump on fb instead of realising that a large portion of the population actually want trump, brexit, no immigration, muslim bans etc. Hey, but it is easier to think that the people were tricked into voting like that.

And this is what's wrong with today's dev—not able to see what's plainly wrong, putting the blame on others.

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#88

Post by teaneedz »

matte_black wrote: post #43

I went out with a girl who works at Facebook (she does software development) and asked her this very question. Basically her response was that the whole incident really isn’t even Facebook’s fault but rather the third party developers. Even though Facebook could have done a better job of protecting data, it’s a waste of time to do so as these companies will always find a way to violate the TOS. It’s a bit like fighti…

I can't understand that line of thought. Devs and management really like to look like they are not complicit in something that has gone terribly wrong.

Yes, 3rd party devs are responsible and yes Facebook is too. Facebook's business model and algos feed the ad tech machine. Saying that FB is just a scapegoat is some kind of twisted tomfoolery.

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#89

Post by teaneedz »

matte_black wrote: post #52
danpalmer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I roughly agree with this in terms of the recent events, but Facebook has been doing creepy stuff that I think many people disagree with for a long time, and that seems to be getting worse. Advertisers being able to target so effectively, by salary, by socio-economic status, and by hundreds or even thousands of metrics. I think that's still bad, and I don't think I could work on a product like that.

I’m still amazed that people think really efficient advertising is creepy.

"really efficient"="ubiquitous tracking"

not too hard to understand the creep factor for most people.

Re: Ask HN: What do Facebook employees think about their company?

#90

Post by vernon99 »

I left Facebook a few months back so I don’t have anything holding me from sharing my honest take. Also I was involved in platform development a lot. Don’t envy the folks who stayed btw - now it’s gonna be much harder.

In short: Facebook does care about user privacy a lot. Some of the worst pains we had in platform development at Messenger were related to convincing privacy team to let us open more info to developer. And we usually fail. There was and is a strong sense of internal paranoia around leaking any user data, even if anonimized.

Whenever there’s a chance of a data leakage of any sort, everything halts and the whole team is in on it. I personally spent weeks of my life in such meetings, redesigning whole parts of the product to avoid even simplier things like anon user tracking by developers with no explicit consent etc.

So when I hear people saying that Fb intentionally does something bad or doesn’t care - those people really don’t have clue.

Current situation is a byproduct of two things: 1) legacy decisions (that were reverted in 2015) from when the company was younger and more open and didn’t have those protocols and 2) just the very sensitive nature of this data. This is a social network. What would you expect it to give developers from it’s API? If not your info and parts of your graph. Even those days are over now due to (imo) unjustified paranoia.

Ads targeting is another example of that. The fact that you see targeted ads _does_not_ mean advertiser knows _anything_ about you individually. It’s fully anonimized for them!

And no, there’s no evil intent to make the UI more confusing to get more of your data. It’s the opposite at that point, Jeez, folks, take off your tin hats. Many things to question Fb about (most notably product innovation) but here they are doing their best.

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