Leaving the company should not make them immune to prosecution for criminal collection and sale of personal data.
Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
201–210 of 414 posts
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a person, maybe if I squint very very very hard. Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors. And there hasn't been a business model that provides a free consumer web product without monetizing user data.
Legally, he has a duty to maximize value for his board and investors You should probably stop using the word "legally" in this context. There have been thousands of companies over the decades that put other things before shareholder value, and somehow managed to not run afoul of the law. Also, it might help if you provided a citation to this law to bolster your argument. And there hasn't been a business model that pr…
I'd love to read a blog post talking about how to make free consumer web apps without monetizing user data. I really would. That's the crux of the issue here -- is there an alternative to the ad-tech playbook?
There's all the Redhat / enterprise open-source examples, but I'm specifically talking about consumer web products. Redhat's product is enterprise infrastructure.
There's free as in a trial or limited functionality to get you to buy the premium offering, but then the business model isn't really based off a free product... the free product is a promotion, not a business model.
You can have one group of premium users subsidize all the free users. In social, the main examples would be LinkedIn or Angelist, but again, access to the user data is the product these companies eventually sell.
There's Wikipedia, but that's a non-profit. Nothing wrong with that, people make a living that way and we need more like it, but I'm talking about companies where profits can serve as a strong motivator. This also excludes government services.
Maybe Google Maps qualified as free in the beginning, but any free service that Google makes is pretty much some clever way to acquire more user data to support other parts of the enterprise. HN itself falls under this category: HN is an ingestion pipeline for YC (the YC app asks for your HN handle, hello future YC app reviewer!).
I know it's a trite and a tired saying, but it really is true: if you're not paying for it, you are the product. That's not bad per-se... another way of looking at it is in the same way the sharing economy unlocked underutilized physical assets, these services have unlocked a new source of wealth not measured by our wallets: our attention. Lets describe it as we pay for these services with our attention-dollars.
My point is anything that's a "free consumer service" business model is really some kind of machine that converts attention-dollars into cash-dollars.
I would love to see a discussion of non-cash-dollar, non-attention-dollar business models. If you can think of a way of giving away Something that People Want (TM) for free without the corrupting influence of optimizing for their attention, well, you've found the next genuinely interesting unicorn.
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#203Earlier 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…
> 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. Cool. In other developing countries it lead to a massacre.
> In other developing countries it lead to a massacre.
That's like saying that telephones or the postal service lead to massacres when evil people call each other or mail propaganda flyers to the public. Yes Facebook should have done more to remove that content, but you can't really say Facebook caused the problems, and they probably would have happened on other platforms if Facebook didn't exist or had better moderation.
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe people are complicated and they use tools to connect and amplify natural behavior. All this digital technology and instant communication with everyone is still very new and the human species is still learning how to best use it. If Facebook didn't exist then something else would've taken its place. This is part of technological progress and similar things happened with the invention of radio, tv and telecom.…
Well, the people who argue that these networks have an overall negative impact have plenty of examples to draw from - ranging from the last US election, to the genocide in Myanmar, the extremely fine ad targeting it enables perpetuating sociology economical discrimination, etc. People who argue for its value mostly point to the fact that grandma can see pictures of the kids and other pedestrian examples of things tha…
It's not clear at all, you just picked a random example of grandma when the reality is billions of people have and connected to each other and there are many examples of people avoiding censorship, exposing crimes, finding loved ones, getting help, and spreading news that otherwise wouldn't have happened.
The real issue is human nature. Social media is just a new medium that facilitates instant (and optionally public) communication but its still the same people at the end of the day. Email, chat and phone calls still have have vast amounts of scammers and propaganda and that will continue into any new comms that people use. There's no magic solution for that and never will be.
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe people are complicated and they use tools to connect and amplify natural behavior. All this digital technology and instant communication with everyone is still very new and the human species is still learning how to best use it. If Facebook didn't exist then something else would've taken its place. This is part of technological progress and similar things happened with the invention of radio, tv and telecom.…
I am sure the company has access to metrics that the public doesn't. The argument that the uninformed majority is a priory right is not convincing enough. ...No offense to anyone's democratic beliefs.
Can you share an example of what kind of metrics that would be? What's the KPI for social media being net positive or negative?
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#206> The differences stemmed from Mr. Zuckerberg’s asserting control over his company and its apps — Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger — by rolling out a plan to integrate the services into a single privacy-focused platform, according to six people involved in the situation.
I'm mystified as to why Zuckerberg would let them leave over this. It very simply doesn't seem like a good idea (how many WhatsApp users know FB even owns it? What good does it do to remind them?) and when you've got major product heads disagreeing with you it's time to make a clear argument. So far I haven't seen one.
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're deranged.
It's actually well documented that Facebook enabled and inflamed the Rhingya genocide in Myanmar. Here is an example article but there are many more: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/facebook-role-rohingy...
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Whatsapp have all been (and continue to be) exploited to spread messages of hate and ignorance. It seems strange to me that Facebook is coming under so much criticism relative to the other platforms when, from my perspective, they've also been the most proactive about trying to address these issues. I haven't heard anything from Twitter recently regarding trying to minimize hate speech and ignorance on its platform (and its the worst service for divisiveness, in my opinion). Google only just recently demonetized anti-Semitic and anti-vax material on YouTube and only after significant backlash from its advertisers (not its users who have been calling for a response for years). Why is this?
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#208Earlier 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…
> 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. Cool. In other developing countries it lead to a massacre.
Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following the rules when posting here?
They include: "Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or maybe people are complicated and they use tools to connect and amplify natural behavior. All this digital technology and instant communication with everyone is still very new and the human species is still learning how to best use it. If Facebook didn't exist then something else would've taken its place. This is part of technological progress and similar things happened with the invention of radio, tv and telecom.…
Well, the people who argue that these networks have an overall negative impact have plenty of examples to draw from - ranging from the last US election, to the genocide in Myanmar, the extremely fine ad targeting it enables perpetuating sociology economical discrimination, etc. People who argue for its value mostly point to the fact that grandma can see pictures of the kids and other pedestrian examples of things tha…
Sharing photos with your family and aquintances has been feasible since the invention of snail mail and photography, yet it wasn’t done at nowhere near this scale. Ultimately people get enough value out of Facebook to use it for a billion hours a day, but it’s easy to forget that and just focus on the negative effects.
Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox
#210Why 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.
Money, FB pays better than almost anyone else.