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Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#191

Post by eeeeeeeeeeeee »

passn wrote: post #143
mindgam3 wrote: post #61

I've known Chris Cox since freshman year of college and he was an informal advisor to my first startup. The NYT article referenced in hashberry's earlier comment includes a key quote: “For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: Social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral,” Mr. Cox said in a note to employees on Thursday. “As its builders…

"Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a good thing for the world was a lie" - That is such a broad generalization. In the developing world where I live Facebook gives me the opportunity to maintain contact with my family who live on the other side of the world, as I walk the streets of São Paulo, for free. There are hundreds of millions of others like me who keep in contact with their family because of Facebook (and th…

And yours is a broad generalization, too, about the impact Facebook has on society. You cheer all the good and mention none of the negative consequences of this model. Google also makes much about the internet less frustrating and easier for novices, but I also understand what is being given up in that compromise.

I'm not even saying the "open" experience is not often without frustration. It absolutely is. Part of Facebook's success is connecting the frustrating parts about the internet and making it usable for normal people. But it's not like Facebook achieved some amazing technological advancement, nor is connecting the communication mechanisms of the world something that cannot be done without harvesting all of our personal data.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#192

Post by mlboss »

notJim wrote: post #170
shosko wrote: post #145

Why would anyone want to work for Facebook these days? When you are maintaining the largest advertising stream since TV while actively destroying society's discourse, I'm not sure what redeeming qualities it has. I think the most important thing any of us can do is get away from Facebook and move towards pursuits that fix problems, including the ones Facebook helped create.

They have some of the highest salaries, according to levels.fyi. They've also produced cool tech like React. Developers I know who work there seem pretty happy. Plus, most people seem less concerned about the negative effects and/or basically believe they can be fixed or mitigated.

Not to mention Pytorch. Hottest deep learning framework.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#193

Post by joe_the_user »

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #191
passn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a good thing for the world was a lie" - That is such a broad generalization. In the developing world where I live Facebook gives me the opportunity to maintain contact with my family who live on the other side of the world, as I walk the streets of São Paulo, for free. There are hundreds of millions of others like me who keep in contact with their family because of Facebook (and th…

And yours is a broad generalization, too, about the impact Facebook has on society. You cheer all the good and mention none of the negative consequences of this model. Google also makes much about the internet less frustrating and easier for novices, but I also understand what is being given up in that compromise. I'm not even saying the "open" experience is not often without frustration. It absolutely is. Part of Fa…

I don't think that "broad generalization" fairly characterizes the gp. They are saying they observe a lot of benefit in Facebook - if you read the post, that's all they say.

Maybe Facebook also produces a lot of ill. Any claim about the final impact of Facebook is claim to be able to sum up the good and the evil FB does and get a definite value. That's a pretty challenging argument.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#194

Post by rcpt »

shosko wrote: post #145

Why would anyone want to work for Facebook these days? When you are maintaining the largest advertising stream since TV while actively destroying society's discourse, I'm not sure what redeeming qualities it has. I think the most important thing any of us can do is get away from Facebook and move towards pursuits that fix problems, including the ones Facebook helped create.

Because deciding presidential elections around the world isn't the kind of thing one usually gets to do.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#195

Post by en-us »

resters wrote: post #179
en-us wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all fine until some special interest with money wants to launch a targeted propaganda campaign in your country. That can and has lead to effects ranging from detrimental government policy to outright genocide. Nobody argues that Facebook keeping families in touch is a bad thing. It's the rest of it - the collecting and selling of data, the paid targeted propaganda campaigns, the intentional manipulation of use…

Ironically the fear-mongering about the propaganda campaign you are describing is intended to turn Facebook into an instrument of US government propaganda. Zuckerberg has been resisting that, which is why Facebook is being attacked from all sides at the moment.

I've been saying that Facebook would do these things since around 2008. And now you're here telling me I'm part of some fear mongering campaing orchestrated by the US government. That's beyond absurd.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#196

Post by jancsika »

renholder wrote: post #49
ordinaryradical wrote: post #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 t…

> The ad dollars come from knowing you, not concealing you. Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests... Imagine what people would share between themselves if it wasn't "public for the world to see". Imagine how many more data points that would produce for targeted advertisements on the Facebook platform, alone. Edit: Including necessary referenc…

> Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests...

You mean like a Google search?

If you don't mean a Google search, I'm not sure what you could mean. What could possibly be more intimate than a person's lifelong history of general queries in their pursuit of knowledge and personal identity?

Oftentimes those queries are even natural language sentence fragments that directly convey the person's intentions.

What more are you claiming a company could infer by convincing their userbase that their data remains private?

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#197

Post by Fins »

arunv wrote: post #69
tyre wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook has the strongest culture in the valley For a company so regularly beset by scandal, this feels like a bold assertion. Culture of what?

Any other company in their shoes would have had a mass exodus. Chris was a big part of making employees feel like they shared a piece of the dream. Whatever your thoughts about Facebook, the fact that some of the smartest people have worked, and continue to work at a company "beset by scandal" should give you pause.

Being "smartest" (whatever that means, and assuming it even is so; being good at coding has very little to do with being smart) is completely orthogonal to being a decent person.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#198

Post by [deleted] »

praneshp wrote: post #169
Pharmakon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Some of the most venal, greedy, and ruthless people in history made their money then turned to philanthropy to improve their image. I would argue that it was downright predictable, and so would Alfred Nobel. In fact using charity to either improve your public image (as in Gates and many others) is probably only matched by people like Jimmy Saville using charity to give themselves license to continue committing c…

Right, the then world's richest started a charitable trust purely so he could improve his public image.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#199

Post by jedberg »

yaseer wrote: post #168

Facebook is big tobacco. Intelligent people generating profits that knowingly harms society (even if you do get some joy from a cigarette, that doesn't justify working for a tobacco company). I really hope the smart people at Facebook see the obvious parallel, and choose another career. History will judge you.

Not exactly. Tobacco has no benefits to society except possibly a dopamine hit for the user.

Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school. And I know that it's only because of Facebook, because Facebook didn't exist for the first 10 years after I graduated, and most of my friends didn't get on it until about 15 years after graduation. It was great finally reconnecting them with them all.

They are people whose company I enjoyed, but we just didn't have the time to have individual conversations every week with the 50 people we knew from school. Having a way for them to broadcast updates has been super helpful.

Also, the Portal is great. I got a pair when they came out, and it's easy enough that my four year old will call her grandparents regularly without my help. It's the only platform that we've found that is easy enough for both the four year old and my parents.

I use messenger and WhatsApp to keep in touch with friends in other countries. They are easy to find because we're friends on Facebook.

So yeah, Facebook still has a lot of positives for society. I don't judge someone who works there just for working there. I hope that they are working to enhance the positives and minimize the negatives. From what I've seen with the folks I've talked to, that is always the case.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#200

Post by musicale »

Here is my informal ranking of Facebook's biggest problems:

1. Facebook itself (built on multiple harmful feedback loops)

2. Facebook's business model (selling eyeballs, etc. to advertisers)

3. Mark Zuckerberg (expansion justifies anything)

4. Facebook's customers (advertisers who only care about influence)

5. Facebook's users (rotting apples in a rotten barrel)

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