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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#671

Post by wpietri »

psb217 wrote: post #632
wpietri wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. To me a Potemkin village is one or two steps further away from reality. The Potemkin village is unoccupied and has no potential for occupation. All involved in its construction know it's fake. My team was sincere, worked hard, and definitely got some good stuff done. Just not nearly as much as we wanted.

In this metaphor you're the buildings, not the builders.

Same thing then. In the metaphor, the buildings' only purpose and only outcome is to fool. One of our purposes was to get things done. And we definitely had some impact. If the public/regulatory pressure stayed constant, we would have gotten some more done. We would also have gotten more done if executives had taken it more seriously, of course.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#672

Post by wpietri »

luckydata wrote: post #451
Dracophoenix wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press. Could this just be an issue of too many problems to ca…

I worked at FB (not for very long) but you can trace everything back to the awful performance process they have (the infamous PSC). At the end of the day, hard to measure stuff doesn't get you promoted while tangibly moving metrics does. If you incentivize people that way, it doesn't take anyone WILLINGLY doing anything evil to end up with a pretty evil thing on your hand. If you optimize for profits and only that, y…

I agree their incentive structure is at the root of this. But this is an incentive structure designed by one group of conscious actors and then followed by another group. A bunch of people choose this. And given the many years of public critique of Facebook, they can hardly be unaware of what they're choosing.

The truth is that almost anybody could sell crack. Most of us choose not to.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#673

Post by wpietri »

shrimpx wrote: post #667
seattle_spring wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we go by the content of teamblind, then every company's engineers only care about TC and leveling up.

Are you saying that people on teamblind are only focusing on the TC aspect, and also care about many other things, or that only a subset of people only care about TC? If the latter, it’s still worrisome that so many of those people who hop around chasing only TC and not caring about subject matter, are highly valued at these companies like Facebook. Glib and shallow E6 and E7 don’t make for great tech leadership in a…

I get your point, but glib and shallow climbers are exactly what you want for a company that only supposedly cares. They're very good at supposedly caring!

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#674

Post by wpietri »

Radim wrote: post #512
subsubzero wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How I find them is in their speech. They come across as extremely insincere and "out" themselves by how they talk to either the interviewer(focus alot on themselves) or someone they believe is beneath them(dismissive). If you are a gatekeeper for their employment or something they need expect flattery and overly kind words. If you are no longer that gatekeeper expect to never hear from them again or abuse. Also this…

"Just call BS! Geez, that was easy. Why are all these HR people so incompetent?" This assumes you are more intelligent than them, and can see through their insincerity during an interview process. But have you considered that these "smooth talkers" can be smarter than you? Or at least have been perfecting their BS craft (while you perfected yours, such as programming), so that you are absolutely no match?

For sure. Standard lines of BS don't work well on me because they're optimized for other people. But I firmly believe that for every person, there's a line of bullshit they're vulnerable to. And the people most vulnerable are the ones most sure they're too sharp to be BSed.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#675

Post by whakim »

the_other wrote: post #662
whakim wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you’re still on FB? 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.

A social network is just a kind of business, like a chain of supermarkets or a steel mill. You could, of course, have a non-profit social network (or a business with a different corporate structure - as I allude to in a parent post), but that's not what Facebook is or what its peers are. In the United States, businesses are beholden first and foremost to their shareholders, which means that there's an inherent tension when "giving a shit about you" and "making money" come into conflict. What makes you think that a social network with a normal corporate structure and in the absence of countervailing regulation would have more empathy than any other business?

As an aside, I'd like to make the broader point that boiling everything down to "Facebook=evil" doesn't seem like a productive way to get the changes that I think both of us would like to see. It walks right into the strawman arguments that Zuckerberg is responding to in his post ("Why would we invest so much in trust and research if we didn't care?"). And it doesn't capture the fact that Facebook is a huge entity comprised of a lot of people, many of whom have different incentives and some of whom are even trying to do the right thing (see: Anna Haugen).

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#676

Post by fortuna86 »

wutbrodo wrote: post #628
fortuna86 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I should be clear. I don't think that there are no levers that Facebook can or should pull here. But that framing contradicts the breathless hysteria and shoddy statistics behind the push that Facebook is _causing_ damage, as opposed to being in a position to uniquely reduce harm in a way that (eg) contemporary radio manufacturers when radio was being used to foment the Rwandan genocide. That is to say, these upheava…

Found the Facebook employee.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#677

Post by adolph »

mbesto wrote: post #264
adolph wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if it were controlled by mutual funds people would want mutual funds to be held responsible? Or would they turn to the CEO?

It also means if the board was comprised by a diverse set of people (which it is) they could oust him if they wanted (they can't). The public could put pressure on those people much easier than putting sole pressure on him.

So if Zuckerberg reinvested thru a mutual it would be ok?

Was the problem with Theranos that’s it’s board wasn’t diverse enough?

I wonder how a Facebook without Zuckerberg perform? Would it zip along for a while before slowing to irrelevance like the times Jobs left Apple?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#678

Post by mensetmanusman »

the_other wrote: post #662
whakim wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess you’re still on FB? 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.

An actual social network would let you choose how you feel, which is why you can choose your friends who might all be downers and feel horrible, and the social network will let them share their despair with you.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#679

Post by mensetmanusman »

sofixa wrote: post #541
jamiek88 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

If the United Nations ran Instagram, they would ban any discussion of human rights in Hong Kong, because China is a veto member.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#680

Post by richardfey »

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.…

That is a beautiful simile, thank you!
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