661–670 of 699 posts
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Nobody is forcing him to keep doing this. He’s waking up every day and making the choice to keep running FB today the same way he ran it yesterday. He could just quit
Sure, but... what would that change?
I personally do not buy the “in over his head” argument, fwiw.
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> 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.
It’s quite hard to see how it’s just a business that doesn’t give one shit about you no matter now many followers you have or how many likes you got when you’re still using it.
An actual social network would care how you feel today.
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Sure, but... what would that change?
This is a rebuttal to the “he’s in over his head” argument. If he personally is in over his head, the obvious solution is to quit and let someone more capable run the company. I personally do not buy the “in over his head” argument, fwiw.
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This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past. Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incenti…
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…
That's a bit of an over dramatization, PSC is just peer feedback, and is very similar to Perf reviews at Google as well as other large SV tech companies. Having done both I didn't experience this "Hunger Games mentality" you described.
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This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past. Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incenti…
"Facebook has created a system of incentives that are inexorably leading to harmful outcomes" Exactly right. The solution baffles me. "Force Facebook to reveal and permit research so we understand the system and fix it" Basically keep the harmful system in place, but pass the reins to an unspecified cabal hiding under the innocuous word "we". Hard pass.
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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 h…
I'm disagreeing with the "just a college kid" portrayal. There are of course a few circumstances greatly helped the trajectory, as did many other smart people help it along. What I'm trying to imprint is that without Zuck being very intelligent, the level of success Facebook would've had would be far far smaller.
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Your sentiment reflects what I see on teamblind.com. It's all TC and leveling up. A ton of people don't give much of a shit about the subject matter.
If we go by the content of teamblind, then every company's engineers only care about TC and leveling up.
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First-past-the-post voting is the primary cause in the US. It doesn't automatically result in a two party system everywhere if there are other features of the government that work against it. The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister while the US has the Electoral College which elects our President.
That's not the big difference. The big difference is as philistine implies: the two US parties are dramatically more democratic internally , so there is just far less need for people to create new parties to begin with. By world standards the Democrats and Republicans are barely coherent parties at all. For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the part…
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The senior execs are the ones who set up the incentive systems there. They are the ones who are richly paid to provide oversight. So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent. And yes, I think we should change the incentives. We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 fin…
Again, this >>We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 financial crisis, but instead nobody did time does not contradict anything else. But this >>So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent. is incorrect. Those are not the only two options. Reality is typically more c…
Think of it similar to handling explosives. Are they useful and important in society? Definitely. Are they subtle and complicated, such that working with them can easily harm somebody in ways that are not foreseeable to the naive? You bet.
But when somebody decides to create and apply explosives and hurts somebody, we don't just say, "Gosh, that's very complicated. Who could have known how it would work out?" We say, "You intentionally chose to work with something powerful and dangerous, so you're responsible for the harm you caused."
Is it more complicated? Sure. And I'm saying that when it comes to highly paid executives who seek out positions that put them in control of dangerous complexity, they become responsible for the outcomes.
They are already seen as responsible when it comes to anything good that happens on their watch, which is why they get paid such fast sums. I'm saying they should be seen as equally responsible when it comes to the harms. No more of this, "Oops we crashed the economy/poisoned a bunch of people/actively enabled genocide" stuff. All of that "more complex" reality becomes their problem if they are in control of it.
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The breakup was a huge win for consumers. Long-distance rates dropped significantly due to competition and the telephone system became much more open. And I think it dramatically aided early internet adoption. If you read "When Wizards Stay Up Late" you'll see how big a barrier AT&T was to the adoption of packet-switched networks, rather than the circuit-switched networks they sold people. How far would the Internet…
It's hard to say how things would have gone differently, but I don't think it would have been much different. Looking at the ISP world today long after the dust settled, it's not that much different from the Bell era in terms of consumer choices. I have one choice in ISP for my address. A de facto monopoly entrenched by a lackadaisical attitude towards expanding infrastructure connectivity.