Statement from Mark Zuckerberg • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#501

Post by pmp11pmp » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:21 AM UTC

OpieCunningham wrote: post #311

BobbyJo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. It's all well and good that they want to make Facebook safe and healthy, and I honestly believe plenty of people working there are trying to do just that. However, they are operating under the constraint that they cannot move backwards on profits, and therefore engagement. Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under…

Nice. > I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. > Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. There is one person who controls all the constraints: Zuckerberg. He even went so far as to enforce that through his stock classifications. It’s entirely understandable and acceptable to have empa…

Zuckerberg is simply over his head and I think he knows it(I certainly wouldn't want to be in his shoes). I don't think he's evil I think he was enamored of this toy he built, he pushed it in very logical "business" directions, and now it's been adopted by so many people and its so big, its business model is having real world impact where I'm sure he'd prefer, from an intellectual perspective, that it acted totally passively. He's right, no business should have to determine the morals of a society, which is essentially what we are asking of facebook. The bigger picture is more complex than most people realize.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#502

Post by trhway » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:29 AM UTC

rhaksw wrote: post #499

whakim wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not that Facebook or the many people who work there don't care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They do care. It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. In my opinion Haugen's testimony and Zuckerberg's response simply confirm this: Haugen talks a lot about the research that was done and…

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.

>I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care.

No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart. Ethics in big business is like chemistry in high energy physics - it just doesn't exist at those levels of money. At these levels they can be affected only by comparable level of money or power, like the government power.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#503

Post by shrimpx » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:29 AM UTC

reducesuffering wrote: post #408

shrimpx wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I hear from Zuckerberg over and over is "we're good people and working on it, look at A and B things we're doing" with an implication that that's good enough, so what's everybody up in arms about? That's the core of his tone-deafness to me. If Zuckerberg is fully honest, it means he basically just doesn't have a grip on reality and he isn't fit to lead a corporation this big and impactful. And I tend to believe…

> ultimately just a college kid with a laptop who ended up in some circumstances that snowballed When will this “just luck” characterization of Zuck die? His entire company was certain they should sell for $1B, and most executives resigned when he didn’t. He maneuvered control of the majority of voting shares, how many other founders have done that? Instagram and WhatsApp were genius acquisitions everybody at the tim…

Nah, he's really smart, but implying 1T is a measure of his genius is ridiculous. Not only does it downplay the massive contributions of hundreds of people including Peter Thiel and Cheryl Sandberg, but it ignores the market conditions that led to thefacebook.com going viral, not to mention the Winklevosses, who got paid billions in today's valuation. Do you believe that if Zuck never met the Winklevosses, he would have necessarily built a 1T company anyway, because quantity X of genius must necessarily manifest to F(X) valuation? I think the market violently disagrees with you.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#504

Post by ayewo » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:30 AM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #474

luckydata wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way let's give a name to that system, it's called "PSC". Google it. It's the most absurd and ineffective performance management system I've ever witnessed. It creates a Hunger Games mentality within teams and makes doing anything that actually matters virtually impossible, generating an infinite sequence of half assed 6 months projects that get systematically abandoned as soon as the people responsible manage…

> By the way let's give a name to that system, it's called "PSC". Google it. Unless you mean the Florida Public Service Commission, PSC Motorsports, or Pensacola State College you're going to have to be more specific.

“PSC stands for Performance Summary Cycle at Facebook“

At least according to https://www.thelayoff.com/t/13z18mcE when I searched for “facebook psc”.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#505

Post by wickedsickeune » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:34 AM UTC

nickloewen wrote: post #56

With the caveat that I don’t know much about Facebook’s research projects… the question “If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?” sets alarm bells ringing for me—because I can imagine a cigarette company saying the same thing about the scientists they hired to argue that smoking isn’t so bad after all, or an oil…

Same for Dupont having tons of their own research on the health hazards of Teflon, yet both ignored in the name of profits.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#506

Post by davedx » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:34 AM UTC

nonfamous wrote: post #376

spoonjim wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a place where the founder-CEO-demigod like Zuck should able to make better decisions than a professional team like Twitter. The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government. With all the fawning praise of him as a kid I don’t think Zuck envisioned that one day both Democrats and Republicans would be united in their desire to…

Zuck is desperate to be regulated: he asks for Congress to step in every time he’s asked. Regulation would be awesome for Facebook: not only would it be a fig leaf for all their social problems (“hey, it’s not our problem anymore”), it would also stifle any potential competitors out of their market. The costs of regulation are regressive: much more easily absorbed by BigCos than any startup.

That's an extremely pessimistic view of regulation. Somehow other industries manage to do fine despite it. In the EU, GDPR somehow hasn't snuffed out all small businesses.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#507

Post by jamiek88 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:36 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #502

rhaksw wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.

>I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart.…

Then they are too big and must be broken up.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#508

Post by hef19898 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:41 AM UTC

itoocode wrote: post #252

mise_en_place wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a phenomenon I have witnessed working both in high growth startups and traditional Fortune 500s. At some point, the company starts attracting Dark Triad personality types that cement themselves in upper management positions, usually starting at Director level. These people are extremely dangerous, one of them had access to my corporate laptop (as was standard policy for that company) and would torment me by…

Totally agree with you, most of the time founders are not aware this is happening down the ladder. I have seen this scenario with the middle layer management protecting their jobs and gate keeping in most companies today.

Either the founder isn't aware, then they just get egulfed in the new culture until they have, at some point, no power left. Or they are among the worst of the pack and drive the new culture. Given that Zuck somehow managed to retain 50+% of voting rights until now, I would put him in the second group. Jeff would be the same.

And then you would have the truly exceptional people, that manage to combine the ruthless drive needed to grow a successful company, care about their people and have the capabilities to keep those bad actors out, or at least in check. I saw maybe 1.5 of these people in management functions, middle management that is. Not sure of those black swan unicorns exist as founders so.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#509

Post by intended » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:42 AM UTC

throwaway2048 wrote: post #491

intended wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act. In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives. Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to…

its hard to say the problem isn't really solveable when nobody has really tried to begin with.

People are trying, what are you referring to?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#510

Post by xg15 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

jmchuster wrote: post #496

tablespoon wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're exactly describing a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring." The people in power weren't serious about solving the problem (because the only things they'd accept were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or an easy magic solution that could never actually exist), and the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization.

I would posit that no company "actually" cares. The premise of twitter isn't "the social platform that has no abuse". If that were the main goal, i'd imagined they'd be another nothing startup that ran out of money and died years ago. So then if only companies that don't have social good as their primary goals are the ones that would ever exist in the first place, then it feels that trying to judge companies for doin…

> So then if only companies that don't have social good as their primary goals are the ones that would ever exist in the first place

Or alternatively, we could try to view this as the root problem and try to fix it.

Edit: Note there is also a difference between "not having social good as their primary goal" and working effectively against the social good, whether intentional or not.

Edit2: Explanation of the downvote would be nice.