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Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

theguardian.com

451–460 of 487 posts

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#451

"What a story, only in America right?" [About facebook's origin] Zuck: "Well, senator there are big Chinese internet compani.." "The answer is yes, you're supposed to say yes". So much about China. Only in America. The answer is mandatory, it's "Yes".

It was pretty tongue-in-cheek. I wouldn't dig deep into that dialogue.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade secret ? What would that be ? Is there a secret sauce to Facebook's success beyond the early mass adoption and dedication to adtech/attentioneconomy from the beginning ?

I believe so, yes. Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Why? I think, because they cannot agree on how to finance their services on large scales. Facebook has vast monetary resources and they know to manage them. I imagine the story of Facebook as this. In the beginning Facebook was just another campus p…

> What does Facebook do to keep ahead of its competition

It's just the network effect. Google Plus was ahead of Facebook in multiple ways, but it just couldn't take off (sure the fact that Google set unrealistic goals and followed an awful strategy didn't help)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#453
post #425

When you ask general questions you get "We did not do anything illegal, we did something wrong though; but, people do not read Terms Of Use/Privacy, and they do not read manuals" When you ask very specific questions you get "I need to get back to you on that", right? There is clearly a conflict of interest there. In a public hearing the CEO of his own company is basically forced into giving up their trade secrets on…

It's a crass kind of life achievement if all of his life has lead up to adtech. I refuse to believe that there is no middle ground between what facebook is doing and what the average user would like to see them doing.

Middle ground would be possible after solo bootstrapping. Any form of distributed ownership will bring expectations of profit without responsibility.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#454
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Would this not be adequately explained by the first movers advantage (or maybe not the very first, but very early), coupled with the network effect?

No, as Facebook was not first. Myspace was a thing, and before that Friendster.

I would suggest that it was a first mover's advantage into mainstream society. My mum and dad have never heard of Friendster and My Space

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#455
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the point. People need to stop seeing "better than a coin flip" as "knowing you better than your lover".

It's a reference to a study where they had an algorithm fed with a certain number of facebook likes compete against personal acquaintances (including spouses) in predictig personality traits. The algorithm won: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

But what's the supposed ground truth that spouses and algorithms were tested against? Self reporting? Some other glorified coin flip algorithm that maybe just did the same mistakes as the "thumbs" algorithms? An export panel populated with people that, unlike the benchmarked spouses and acquaintances, used the same jargon as the algorithm authors?

(Glancing over the footnotes it seems to be (b), some other algorithm)

The beauty of adtech: it's perfectly fine to be wrong as long as advertisers think you are right.

On meta level, this "better than your lover" meme/study is surprisingly enlightening.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#456
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Would this not be adequately explained by the first movers advantage (or maybe not the very first, but very early), coupled with the network effect?

No, as Facebook was not first. Myspace was a thing, and before that Friendster.

But these weren't the same products as Facebook.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so, yes. Why else would they be so successful? Any other attempt to replace Facebook (or even copy it) as a social network had failed or remained insignificant. Why? I think, because they cannot agree on how to finance their services on large scales. Facebook has vast monetary resources and they know to manage them. I imagine the story of Facebook as this. In the beginning Facebook was just another campus p…

> What does Facebook do to keep ahead of its competition It's just the network effect. Google Plus was ahead of Facebook in multiple ways, but it just couldn't take off (sure the fact that Google set unrealistic goals and followed an awful strategy didn't help)

G+ UI was bad for mainstream adopters.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#458
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delete is a technical word that has a specfiic meaning. Respectfully, if that were true, we wouldn't all be having this discussion.

Respectfully, the fact that we're having this discussion means some participants aren't adhering to the technical definition. There's a meandering, geographically and socialogically heterogeneous definition that is non-technical. In court, I believe a technical expert would use the former, not the latter (unless specifically required to do otherwise).

What do you think that definition is? I've never seen a single, authoritative, technical definition of the term, nor anyone with the authority to write one.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#459
post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delete is a technical word that has a specfiic meaning. Respectfully, if that were true, we wouldn't all be having this discussion.

Respectfully, the fact that we're having this discussion means some participants aren't adhering to the technical definition. There's a meandering, geographically and socialogically heterogeneous definition that is non-technical. In court, I believe a technical expert would use the former, not the latter (unless specifically required to do otherwise).

English courts don't like to give specific technical meanings to words. They prefer to use the everyday meaning as understood by the reasonable person.

I understand this is perhaps a cultural difference to the US.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe for a second that this much fuss would have been made over this issue if Trump had lost the election. Some law enforcement action may have been taken, but it wouldn't have been front page news. The reason for my quotes is that Trump is "unapproved" which is the explanation for the scale of the reaction. I don't particularly approve of him either, but considering the real motivations of the people writ…

Of course there wouldn't be as much fuss about it. Trump losing the election would imply that the attempts at influencing people were unsuccessful. At a glance, that would indicate that regulation is unnecessary (though detailed analysis could show otherwise).

Foreign spending on political FB ads was a drop in the ocean. Especially when you consider it played to both sides (acknowledge it leaned towards Trump), was not all in swing states, and a lot of it was after the election. This is almost certainly not about them.
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