Statement from Mark Zuckerberg • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#541

Post by sofixa » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:01 AM UTC

jamiek88 wrote: post #507

trhway wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I can't see it working. Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun off, absolutely no question about it. But Instagram and Facebook still remain way too big.

And how do you break them up? By geographic area? People would be pissed because they have contacts with, or maybe want to watch vacation videos from people from different areas.

IMHO the only options would be:

* non-profit run by the UN or similar

* forced to open all data and APIs to make it a platform, with rules to make it an even playing field

In both cases with much less, and why not zero, "engagement" focus ( just show the latest stuff chronologically from the things you've liked/subscribed to). Could either work? No idea, but seems to me that they have better chance than a Facebook per country or region.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#542

Post by jmfldn » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:03 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #68

I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…

Its been said that this psychopathic behaviour is an emergent property of many corporations and emerges due to the nature of their very legal structure. In other word, the people may be fine but the outcomes can turn out not to be. See...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_%282003_film%2...

"The Corporation attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law"

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#543

Post by ClawsOnPaws » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:20 AM UTC

I'm not trying to defend Mark here, but it does bother me slightly that people continuously bring up that really old quote of his from many years ago. People change. I've said some disagreeable things on chat many years ago as well. Maybe as a joke, maybe I was frustrated, but I do regret them and I've since grown as a person. I would hate it if someone kept rehashing something I said ages ago to further their narrative of me. Would it not make sense to judge a person by what they're doing now rather than what they did in college? What about you? Have you never made dumb comments that you really wish you hadn't? What if those kept getting brought up against you now rather than who you've become since then? Just a thought.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#544

Post by rhaksw » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:21 AM UTC

whakim wrote: post #517

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 honestly don't know if it's possible. Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. That's just my surface-level take though. I guess the meta-question is what to do about highly-profitable lines of business that cause demonstrable social harm. Clearly regulation and government intervention are one answer, as are reforms to corporate governance st…

> Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable.

Yeah I don't know that anyone could have predicted these networks would become too massive to displace. Intervention should be on the table, no doubt about it. I hope they bring up net neutrality and Facebook's violation of it via internet.org. I thought "Free Basics" had died but apparently it's still going.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#545

Post by the_other » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:27 AM UTC

whakim wrote: post #517

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 honestly don't know if it's possible. Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. That's just my surface-level take though. I guess the meta-question is what to do about highly-profitable lines of business that cause demonstrable social harm. Clearly regulation and government intervention are one answer, as are reforms to corporate governance st…

> Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable.

But FB isn’t a social network. It’s an engagement farm and advertising platform that abuses a social network to drive its business aims.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#546

Post by fmax30 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:28 AM UTC

fortuna86 wrote: post #481

wutbrodo wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people completely have their head in the sand about how utterly awful the average person is. A massive chunk of what people complain about is simply attributable to the fact that people are monsters, and that global connectivity means we can now all talk to each other without distribution being tightly bottlenecked and controlled (eg publishers, broadcasters, radio, etc). There's little that Facebook is accused…

Facebook tried to go with "we're not bad, the people are" a while back. Yeah people are bad, but if you provide the tools for them to organize and further radicalize, you are responsible for what comes next.

So what is the solution in your opinion?

Do we take Facebook away? The same problem will appear again in the next big social media network.

I do not know why people try going after facebook with pitchforks, when it is very much a people problem. One way to solve this would be to take anonymity of the internet away completely, but then people would

Facebook is just a platform, it isn't like there are a bunch of evil people sitting on a computer finding the most vile pieces of content and showing it to you.

It is what people seek, facebook just facilitates it. I am sure if google was to do similar studies on what people search for and how it affects them, it will see similar results.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#547

Post by jhugo » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:28 AM UTC

> The deeper concern with an outage like this isn't how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones, run their businesses, or support their communities.

The messaging between Facebook and media outlets here is so consistent (Facebook's services are critical communications infrastructure, people get hurt when they can't use them) that I wonder whether Facebook was actively pushing that message during the outage to get media to focus on the impact on people's lives (such focus being overall positive for Facebook, by showing how important their services are to people) rather than the failure.

I just don't buy it at all though. In terms of person-to-person communication, the friction of replacing Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is insignificant. Where I live, Messenger and WhatsApp are the most popular chat apps by far, and are used for everything from personal communications to ordering food to business negotiations. During the outage, people didn't wring their hands and despair at not being able to communicate. They just used a different app.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#548

Post by whakim » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:40 AM UTC

the_other wrote: post #545

whakim wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't know if it's possible. Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. That's just my surface-level take though. I guess the meta-question is what to do about highly-profitable lines of business that cause demonstrable social harm. Clearly regulation and government intervention are one answer, as are reforms to corporate governance st…

> Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. But FB isn’t a social network. It’s an engagement farm and advertising platform that abuses a social network to drive its business aims.

While I'm sympathetic to your anti-FB bias, I think it's pretty clear that by any reasonable definition Facebook is indeed a social network (which also happens to make gobs of money through advertising, and covets engagement because that increases ad revenue as well as a general sense of "platform health"). The question posed was whether "being bad for society" is an emergent property of social networks as they grow.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#549

Post by lexapro » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:43 AM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #518

ehnto wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which will never happen. That takes customer impetus, it's not there. People don't understand the cost of the free products they use, they are unlikely to switch. So what ways would influence your outcome to actually happen? Because I think it would be the right way to run software platforms as well, I just don't see a pathway there that isn't heavy handed. I would be for regulating the advertising industry, since I…

I think a freemium model would be better. You should have to pay for having a large number of followers/friends past a certain point. For example, maybe an account with 1,000 friends is free. Up to 10,000: $5 / month, up to 100,000 $50/month, and so on. If you're Kim Kardashian with 250 million followers and you're making millions of dollars hawking skin cream or whatever, you can afford to pay a few thousand dollars…

The problem is, FB stock would drop 90% in an instant if they were to announce this.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#550

Post by cute_boi » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 8:52 AM UTC

"We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health"

As always these people seems to prevaricate we all know he means "We care deeply about profits and any issue that can impede our growth."

"Many of the claims don't make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?:

C'mon you allowed the research in a hope that if they produce fruitful result you can show off to the world. And as you were trying to roll instagram for kids such research were essential. And you hide those research from public which means you don't care about child safety or whatever.

I guess I am now tired of reading Zuck fantasies.