Facebook is other people. People have killed each other by the millions, and now that violence is playing out in the non-physical space. We shouldn’t be surprised.
Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
131–140 of 609 posts
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook. The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre/Diem be…
>there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent Really? Are they forced to pay more because people are actively avoiding the company, or because they have to pay more for top talent due to competitors?
I was also interested to know what "double-digit premium" actually means in this context. I feel like the order of magnitude are confusing to me.
Like, they pay people $10-$99 more, or they pay people 10x-99x more?
Neither seems a plausible interpretation of the statement.
Edit: Ok, ok, percentage!
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#133No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for. But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group. And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.
My question is... why do people like us continue to work there? They know what is going on there more than anyone.
Depends what you mean by "us." If it means any engineer, engineers build everything shitty in tech.
If a larger percentage of "us" are repulsed by facebook, it just means that they have to pay more. There's always hundreds of "us" willing to do anything for anybody; I'm sure somebody is helping some Syrian warlord with the spreadsheet keeping track of the books for his open air slave market, and designing a distributed facial recognition network to track the movements and contacts of political dissidents.
i.e. there's no useful "us" except when we're talking about craft.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#134No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for. But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group. And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.
FB, Insta, Whatsapp. They couldn't mess up these businesses if they tried.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
To go a bit further MSM's ad revenue is being hollowed out by Facebook et al. Why would anyone pay to advertise in Economist when they can advertise to "people interested in economics, earning over 150k, last thought about cigarettes three weeks ago" etc. Similarly, if you were an advertising exec at pfizer, would you choose to pay millions of dollars to advertise your meds to a continuously shrinking audience on som…
>it seems like most of the critiques of social media coming from big / old media are just symptoms of having their revenue bled away I feel that so many people blindly hate Facebook that they overlook this point. The loudest critics of social media are the old vanguards of news who are upset that the new kid on the block took their ad money.
>The loudest critics of social media are the old vanguards of news who are upset that the new kid on the block took their ad money.
Also activists who are clearly engaging in motivated reasoning in arguing that Facebook needs to do more to censor conservative opinions.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#136This company will continue running roughshod upon society until governments do something about it. They are too big to fail. Competitors just get bought up. Unsurprising that boomer media can't comprehend this.
I can see the adoption of AWS and related services potentially making Amazon so indispensable to the world's governments and banks that its failure might result in disaster, but I don't think any of Facebook's services qualifies. Unless you're referring to general financial consequences that the failure of any successful company might bring, but that doesn't really make it "too big to fail".
I mentioned it in my post. Facebook has a near-monopoly on social media networks. If a new one comes up, they'll just buy it. Obvious outlier is Tiktok right now, remains to be seen what happens with them though.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook. The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre/Diem be…
It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarke…
Wait, why was AOL a default ban on game servers? Can someone elaborate?
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
They'll go work for the AANG in FAANG. If they're good enough to get into FB, they've good enough for the other 4+. FB transferred from a "change the world" to a "change my finances and make my resume" place several yers ago. Several other companies fill in the latter qualification. Also, and ya I know how this sounds, but if Coinbase keeps it up they and similar companies will and are grabbing some of the same talen…
Ah right. All moral quandaries get resolved while working for AANG.
Well, perhaps just the N, then. But Netflix has always been the odd-duck in FAANG.
(And yes, you can point out reasons not to work at Netflix, but it seems like a whole nother level than the rest of FAANG.)
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stratechery makes a pretty solid argument that the calls for regulating "fake news" in general and Facebook in particular is a Democratic reaction to getting outfoxed by Trump's use of social media in 2016: https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-problems/
Do you think the Democratic Party will ever admit that they lost in 2016 not because of "misinformation" or "fake news" or Russian interference or any of the other nefarious conspiracy theories they've promulgated, but because they put forward a terrible, unlikable candidate whom no-one was enthusiastic about and who offered nothing but sanctimony and a continuation of the failing status quo? Maybe it's not Facebook'…
That's basically what the Stratechery story above argues as well, but the key is that makes Facebook a convenient whipping boy that both sides can hate.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent Really? Are they forced to pay more because people are actively avoiding the company, or because they have to pay more for top talent due to competitors?
I was also interested to know what "double-digit premium" actually means in this context. I feel like the order of magnitude are confusing to me. Like, they pay people $10-$99 more, or they pay people 10x-99x more? Neither seems a plausible interpretation of the statement. Edit: Ok, ok, percentage!
Double digit percentage was my sense-making interpretation.