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Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

nytimes.com

21–30 of 414 posts

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#22
> But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to improve our products for society

"Primum non nocere."

I cannot help but laugh at this statement. I think Facebook has done, and is still doing, way more harm than good for society. Like many other addiction-based services, it generated massive revenues for very few people, at the expense of society.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#23
post #7
post #5

And nothing about the massive downtime fb just experienced yesterday.

Luckily it's not a critical service, nor is Instagram. WhatsApp is probably the most critical as a lot of people depend on it every day, even for business purposes.

Agree. I don't think something like FB or even Amazon.com going down has huge impact. People just come back later and get what they need done.

OTOH, having a subscription based service in specific going down can be catastrophic because you lose so much customer trust (think Azure, Spotify, etc.). In that sense, I guess amazon.com can be bad too with things like prime video, etc.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#24
I just don't understand how anyone can believe his vision for "a privacy-focused social network" is even possible this late in the game. There is too much money riding precisely on the reductions of privacy Facebook has enabled for this to be realistic anymore. The ad dollars come from knowing you, not concealing you. Plus, once you're a public company, the rules change—you have shareholders to honor—and if you got to that IPO by being shady or unethical, backing out of that position is going to be nigh impossible. Their entire business model developed itself on a privacy-destroying data-suck of colossal proportions so where is profitability without that?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#25
post #7
post #5

And nothing about the massive downtime fb just experienced yesterday.

Luckily it's not a critical service, nor is Instagram. WhatsApp is probably the most critical as a lot of people depend on it every day, even for business purposes.

Here in New Zealand, facebook handles a lot of the smaller scale commerce (like craigslist or gumtree might in other places), also many organisations and businesses only have presences on facebook. It's unfortunate, but there certainly are people here who are impacted by facebook outages.

I've heard that ebay's culture has a sense of responsibility to the people who make a living on their platform. As an outsider to both, it does seem like they owe their existence to their users so that sense of responsibility is appropriate.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#26
post #9
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily it's not a critical service, nor is Instagram. WhatsApp is probably the most critical as a lot of people depend on it every day, even for business purposes.

Why is that, is it incidental or based on the features they offer?

There are countries (Brazil, Mexico) where B2C use Whatsapp as an official communication channel: displayed on flyers, TV ads, etc.

Whatsapp is huge here, so it is only natural to be used as a commercial tool as well.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#28

Chris was one of the rare people who understood both the technical side and business side of a product/business. There were so many times where an engineer would start blabbling big terms to avoid doing something or an PM spouts MBA Bullshit and Chris just shuts it down. What outsiders who focused on the PR never knew is that there was a balance of power in FB that kept things going forward. Now, with these changes a…

As the leader of Facebook's products he essentially was directly responsible for the total neglect of the Facebook Developer program which caused the biggest PR disaster in FB's history; not to mention, the misuse of user data collected through the program by Cambridge Analytica.

I fail to see how he was a good leader vs riding the wave of Facebook's success. Sounds like Facebook eventually outgrew him anyway so they fired him.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#29

I just don't understand how anyone can believe his vision for "a privacy-focused social network" is even possible this late in the game. There is too much money riding precisely on the reductions of privacy Facebook has enabled for this to be realistic anymore. The ad dollars come from knowing you, not concealing you. Plus, once you're a public company, the rules change—you have shareholders to honor—and if you got t…

This is a PR stunt, as pretty much everything FB says about data privacy.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#30

Interesting spin from the NYTimes ("Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox"[0]): "The departures follow two years of scandals for Facebook around data privacy and disinformation. The issues have buffeted the Silicon Valley company, causing internal turmoil and a redirection in strategy." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris...

This is what pisses me off. I'm more than willing to criticize Facebook when they deserve it but IMO the media blitzkrieg has said more about the media than Facebook. Not that FB hasn't done scummy things but my faith in the whole attack angle has been reduced

They leaked tens of millions of people's personal information to third parties without so much as notifying them. There were congressional hearings about their privacy violations. Facebook is very publicly pivoting to emphasize personal privacy much more than they have before. It seems like a pretty legitimate bit of context more than an attack.
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