141–150 of 308 posts
I agree to breaking up Facebook. But the message falls flat when the suggestion is to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram into separate companies. This doesn't really do anything. When standard oil or Bell telephone broke up, they were broken across geographic lines or "horizontally" in situations where the business was vertically integrated (separating extraction, refining or transport in the case of standard oil) FB, I…
Fundamentally there's no equivalent to the geographic breakup, as physical natural monopolies emerge because you can only have one company per unit of natural resource. Facebook is a monopoly because of network effects, and by definition only a company as large as facebook can compete with facebook, and a facebook with only a subset of your friends becomes nearly useless.
If facebook has bad behaviour, I think regulation is the only actual solution that actually addresses that behaviour, and makes any sense given the market dynamics.
"Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But his company is a threat to our economy and democracy." "Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks." I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when someone is defined simply as "good". It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good". For example, if w…
I'd be ok with calling Zuckerberg a good person if anything he has ever done has indicated he's honest or open to serious change. But he's not. The pattern is pretty clear. Ever since the Beacon fiasco he's been saying that privacy is important and that he's going to take it seriously and make changes, while every action he and those around him take moves blatantly in the opposite direction. He's been lying every tim…
By way of comparison:
Look at Bill Gates' actions independent of Microsoft. If his foundation cures malaria, and so forth, all other sins are forgiven. I'm pretty conflicted about Gates. But I accept that people are complicated. eg Ruthless on the battlefield of business, humanitarian in retirement.
I'm still chewing on Zuckerberg San Fran General Hospital's surprise billing. I know it was just a donation, not active control. But it now has his name. So I can't understand how someone with more money than god isn't giving away healthcare. If only for the PR. How is someone so insightful into human behavior simultaneously so oblivious?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/7/18137967/er...
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Facebook’s shadow profile of me does not even begin to hold a candle to Google’s shadow profile of me. And Google has been monetizing that profile for a lot longer than Facebook has.
So while we're at it we should look at breaking up Google as well.
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> It's basically saying Google's next I don't think that answers GP's question though, why is facebook first? Why is facebook the chosen one. Surely it wasn't chosen using random number generator.
> why is facebook first? > Why is facebook the chosen one. Surely it wasn't chosen using random number generator. It's it obvious? It's been far more transparently shameless. > I don't think that answers GP's question though, It does. The op was asking a why/why not question. He didn't even mention the concept of sequence.
There but for fortune.
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People are waking up to the importance of privacy. If FB had competing social networks, consumer choice would matter. As it is, we have false choices like FB vs. IG.
Twitter?
Those are by far the dominant social networks in the US. They all compete in terms of fighting for limited user time. WhatsApp is kinda sorta in that group, however it's not particularly popular in the US. Tumblr used to be, it might as well be dead now, it's going the way of MySpace (sold off a few times, passed around, until it's hardly valuable at all).
Snapchat competes primarily with Facebook and Instagram. At the edges there's some competition with sites like YouTube, Reddit, Imgur (and other image sharing networks).
Instagram competes with core Facebook, which is of course why they ate them. Also with Snapchat. To a lesser extent YouTube, Pinterest and misc image sites.
YouTube competes with Facebook and their goal to build a much larger user video platform. To a lesser extent they compete with Snapchat and Instagram, particularly on very short form user video.
Reddit competes with Twitter and some of the smaller niche social networks like Imgur. There's some limited competition between Reddit, Instagram and Pinterest.
LinkedIn competes with Facebook. Microsoft scored a nice protected fiefdom in LinkedIn. It suffers no serious competitive threat other than incompetence.
When you examine the competitive landscape, it's very clear that Facebook has no direct competitor to their core platform. And further, Instagram has far overwhelmed its competition. Facebook core is Facebook's Google search, Instagram is Facebook's YouTube, all are monopolies at what they do. The scope of Facebook core + Instagram + WhatsApp is breathtaking, it must be something like 2.6 to 3 billion monthly actives now when you include everyone across all three major platforms.
The most interesting social network among the group, is Pinterest. If they don't screw things up, they'll have a far better business than Twitter over time. It's a dramatically more mainstream product with direct, obvious, superior monetization potential. None of the other social networks can compete well with what they do (not without contorting themselves into a pretzel and risking their existing userbase and business).
The internet has accelerated winner-take-all dynamics for good and bad.
The day will come when there will be no local news covering high school sports events or community activities. People will rely on viewing participant posts on social media. What’s lost here is that it is so easy to game the system and spread BS...
I think we are seeing a drop in people leaving established tech to startups, but I think most of this is due to the _ludicrous_ amount of money an engineer/PM can make being a 9-5er at one FB/G. Engineers who meet expectations and get promoted at the minimum allowed rate can be an E5 engineer at facebook within 5 years of graduation where there's a median income of ~$300k. Engineers who are good can get promoted much faster/further than that and make absurd amounts of money. With Level 1 directors at FB making over a $1M a year.
It really doesn't make sense for an individual engineer to ever join a small startup nowadays. Being the founder of a successful startup now still makes sense, but considering that much of the low-hanging fruit of the mobile/internet era has been picked, I think being a founder requires more domain/technological expertise than it did in the era when our current unicorns were born.
I like the state of things as someone making good money relatively stress free at a FANG, but I hope a new fundamental technology wave comes soon and creates opportunity for a whole new set of companies, reigniting the startup scene's energy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be ok with calling Zuckerberg a good person if anything he has ever done has indicated he's honest or open to serious change. But he's not. The pattern is pretty clear. Ever since the Beacon fiasco he's been saying that privacy is important and that he's going to take it seriously and make changes, while every action he and those around him take moves blatantly in the opposite direction. He's been lying every tim…
"... if anything [Zuckerberg] has ever done has indicated he's honest ..." By way of comparison: Look at Bill Gates' actions independent of Microsoft. If his foundation cures malaria, and so forth, all other sins are forgiven. I'm pretty conflicted about Gates. But I accept that people are complicated. eg Ruthless on the battlefield of business, humanitarian in retirement. I'm still chewing on Zuckerberg San Fran Gen…