Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#151

Post by Kalium » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

patwolf wrote: post #64

"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…

> It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good".

My interpretation is that the goal is to try to avoid the queston of Zuckerberg's moral character. Do some people think he's evil? Yes. Is that relevant as a matter of public policy? Perhaps not. It's a matter for personal judgments and personal opinion.

The question at hand is Facebook, not Zuckerberg's soul. For most readers, this helps them focus appropriately.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#152

Post by rock_hard » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

istjohn wrote: post #58

anonu wrote: post #7

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…

I disagree. Many people have moved away from FB to IG after all the bad publicity FB has had. If IG was an independent company that consumer choice would mean something. As it is, any privacy conscious social network that mounts any threat to FB will simply be bought as happened with WhatsApp.

Can you cite source for the claim that people have switched?

Cause all I see is people using both...and the publicly available data supports that

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#153

Post by TheRealDunkirk » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

anonu wrote: post #7

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…

I note that all the mini-Bell's have now merged and reformulated into just 3 companies, and $10 says AT&T or Verizon will gooble up CenturyLink before long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System.

I like Elizabeth Warren's idea (in the case of Google) to break up the sales side from the platform side, and let them compete like everyone else for advertising impressions in the exchange. I admit I may not understand the nuance here, but the idea is readily grasped, which is, perhaps, the most-important thing in getting political leverage behind it.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#154

Post by basch » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:15 PM UTC

jmastrangelo wrote: post #142

anonu wrote: post #7

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…

I agree with your premise that breaking up FB, WA and IG doesn't really do anything (I made a much longer comment about this in a reply above). But what would breaking up facebook even mean then? 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…

Its absolutely possible to break facebook up horizontally. And if the government were to explore a breakup, its the way they should go.

Company 1 would be a Social Networking and Hosting PaaS from hardware, networking, bandwidth, databases, serverless workers to services like ads, anti-evil, localization, social graph, development tools, frameworks, runtimes. Company 1, would be THE place to build a social network, if you were an upstart. Company 1 could instantly be a tier 1 competitor to AWS and Azure. Imagine being able to tap into Facebooks Identity services, but running your own Directory Tenant, instead of tied to the FBID. Company 1 would compete with Firebase and restart Pulse, it would jump headfirst against Microsoft and its Visual Studio/GitHub offerings.

Company 2 become clients, consumers, of Company 1 services. They include Messenger, WhatsApp, FB, IG, and Occulus.

The other beauty of a horizontal breakup is that Company 1 lowers the barrier to entry for new upcoming social networks, without being a risk to them being eaten by Company 2. Mark then also can profit off selling his competitors service, similar to AWS profiting off Netflix.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#155

Post by thebigspacefuck » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #121

loudmax wrote: post #108

Better than breaking up social networks would be to force them to interoperate on an open protocol. When I first signed up for Facebook I was disappointed that only other Facebook users could see my account. Then when Google+ came on the scene I thought they'd worked out a way to interoperate with Facebook, but instead Google just wanted their own silo. What we really need is for social networks to interoperate the w…

Another example: what if cell phone carriers only let you talk / text with people on the same carrier network? Suddenly everyone would need to buy T-Mobile, or Verizon, or Sprint, just to talk to one another. Or carry 4 different sim cards, similar to having multiple accounts. Sounds terrible? Good. That's what Facebook is doing now.

Facebook lets you share posts from Twitter and Instagram, not sure about what else

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#156

Post by basch » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:16 PM UTC

anonu wrote: post #7

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…

I 100% agree with you that the idea of spin-offs is flat, tone deaf, and all about PR for the proposers, and not anything actually beneficial to the public.

Wrote more about what I think is better replying to a child comment of yours. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19868464

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#157

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

mensetmanusman wrote: post #148

The real problem is that too many people who didn’t have a voice before can leverage centralized platforms to spread their views to too many people (according to the NYT). 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. Wh…

[deleted]

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#158

Post by jvagner » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:18 PM UTC

davemp wrote: post #134

HNthrow22 wrote: post #123

FB is the sacrificial lamb, popular scapegoat and effective distraction in this new era of SV policies shaping public opinion, ideas and as a result global politics. It seems misplaced, the amount of vitriol and negative press directed at facebook when from my perspective Google/Twitter/Amazon and even Reddit are far, far worse in terms of aggressively monopolistic behavior and negative effects on society and democra…

I agree with other companies being worse influences than FB. Though I'd guess that FB is the target for these articles just because of brand recognition in the publisher's target demographics.

Aside from Equifax, I disagree. I think FB is getting what they deserve.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#159

Post by xiaolingxiao » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:20 PM UTC

jmastrangelo wrote: post #149

While we're discussing Facebook and anticompetitive practices, I'd like to bring the effects of FANG/Unicorns and their current compensation. 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…

what's the median age (in your estimation) of a level I director at FB? and what's "absurd amount of money" for good engineers? Something like 400 - 600K?

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#160

Post by basch » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:23 PM UTC

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #153

anonu wrote: post #7

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…

I note that all the mini-Bell's have now merged and reformulated into just 3 companies, and $10 says AT&T or Verizon will gooble up CenturyLink before long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System . I like Elizabeth Warren's idea (in the case of Google) to break up the sales side from the platform side, and let them compete like everyone else for advertising impressions in the exchange. I admit I may…

Not just merged into 3, but also eaten all the other independent competition that old ATT would have had. GTE was huge and not a Bell (largest independent ATT competitor). Their cellular network was originally half Vodafone. They bought MCI/Worldcom (largest long distance provider after ATT at one point.)

Look at CenturyLink/Qwest/Layer3/Embarq(Sprint)