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Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

economist.com

211–220 of 609 posts

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#211
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be true for entry level jobs, but for senior level jobs the "stain on the resume" issue is very real. A friend was a recruiter for FB until a few months back and has repeatedly stated that over the last 18 months she had an increasingly large percentage of targeted senior candidates refuse to even take her calls.

The same taint would apply after working at Google or Apple or even Barclays banks or MIT. Who wants to go through a 3 interview process just to find out that great candidate simply won't sign until the offer is bumped at least 3x

Anecdotal but a fair number of devs I know would be fine with those names, not FB. Facebook is both evil and trivial by reputation. You can do unimportant work that makes the world worse there, so why not compromise and work for some firm that's evil but important, or good but trivial?

They'd use the interview for practice and free food.

Having said that, I'm not sure you can really tell in the stats that FB needs to pay more for similar talent?

Not sure how MIT comes into it though, isn't that a university?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#212
post #101

Earlier 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.

This doesnt make sense. Which is it? Everyone blindly hating FB? Or just old media?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#213
post #166

Haven’t used FB as a social media platform in a long time. So I understand the decreasing usage by the younger audience. However, I think FB should pivot to strictly a marketplace. My experience of selling items on their marketplace has far exceeded my expectations. In comparison to CL, Reddit, or Nextdoor, FB Marketplace was a much better experience. Not sure if it is the elimination of “anonymity”, but dealt with 0…

How much of that success depends on having such a large audience already using the platform?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#214
post #3

No. 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.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#215
post #3

No. 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.

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…

Print ads are still classier than online ads. In the Economist, your next-door neighbor isn't "Still eating these six foods that will kill you? Here's one weird trick that Virginia retirees are using to save money."

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#216
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, why was AOL a default ban on game servers? Can someone elaborate?

AOL was the Eternal September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September Some admins of private servers blocked its IPs for the same reason IRC mods did. AOL got ordinary people on to the internet, so they were a poorer fit for any existing community on average.

If only we could somehow do that with Reddit now.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#217
post #3

No. 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.

I am aware that Facebook has done a bunch of bad stuff, and that they own Instagram and WhatsApp. I still don't give a shit. For all it's faults Facebook is still the most convenient way to keep up with friends and family spread around the world, and share my underwater photography. If you engage with Facebook on your own terms and "hide all from" the news / politics / meme pages then it works great. And it's free!

And no, I'm not interested in doing extra work to set up Mastodon.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#218

The biggest component missing from Silicon Valley's discussion of Facebook is its pathological lying. They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and the EU [2]. They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3]. (These just off the top of my head.) The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down. That is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik Tok. That is what its surrogates miss…

I'm on the outside looking in, (and this might be an unpopular opinion in this crowd) but that's the reputation of tech in Silicon Valley, no? The mentality is often "we'll be too small to prosecute until we're too big". That's how you end up with these seemingly superlegal entities like Uber, Google, hell even Crunchyroll. Theranos was the peak example of how tech companies are encouraged to misrepresent fact to bot…

What happened with Crunchyroll?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#219

I still have a FB account because my family is on there, and even then I check it maybe once a month, if that. It's just not in my life anymore. When I do go on there, I have a hard time imagining how anyone could get sucked into it. Sometimes I feel like FB is a kind of scapegoat for social critique. Maybe because it's the largest, but not sure. Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent cultural fo…

> I still have a FB account [...] I have a hard time imagining how anyone could get sucked into it.

I drink a glass of beer several times a week, and can't imagine how anyone could become addicted to alcohol.

Very sadly, the world does not feel at all constrained by my imagination.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#220
post #3

No. 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.

That's surprising, they have no intention of hiding that Insta is a FB app. It says Instagram by Facebook when you open it.

Which is probably one of the dumbest decisions they've ever made.
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