Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 609 posts

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#341

Post by andrewla »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #299
ghostoftiber wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced. I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO becam…

The same thing happened with AT&T. After the government broke them up into the regional "baby bells" in the 80s they started eating each other until only one (Southwestern Bell) was left standing. At which point it bought the shell of the original AT&T corporation and promptly renamed itself "AT&T." The AT&T you buy cell phone service from today is actually Southwestern Bell.

Not entirely true -- Bell Atlantic became Verizon after it ate most of the baby bells in the Northeast.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#343

Post by rctec »

jonny_eh wrote: post #326
snowwrestler wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft went flat for a decade after their antitrust trial. They lost many markets where they had significant footholds, struggled to attract and retain top talent, and struggled to enter new markets. They kept making money from Windows, Office, etc. But the tech industry exploded in growth around them, leaving them behind in many ways (technologically, financially, culturally).

One notable exception was video games. In retrospect the success of the Xbox is extremely strange.

The success of Xbox resulted from what was essentially an internal con job. It survived to launch and succeeded because the team responsible managed to keep a straight face about several important lies about what Xbox would be to the rest of the company's leadership and BG himself.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#344

Post by jacobolus »

svachalek wrote: post #307
b3morales wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the tobacco companies did was shift their business into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But they're still made from nicotine. Isn't this okay? Asking genuinely -- I haven't followed this one way or the other. But my understanding was that the health problems were mostly caused by the smoke. Does nicotine itself cause problems when delivered via gum or vape or whatever? Certainly the current ingestion meth…

Vaping is less bad for you than inhaling the big cloud of carcinogens that is cigarette smoke. But even if you discount the direct effects of addiction, which is horrible, there are plenty of other indications nicotine itself is bad for you.

Nicotine is a stimulant, similar to other stimulants such as caffeine. The addictiveness in smoking apparently comes from (1) high dose absorbed rapidly, and (2) combination with other chemicals in tobacco and tobacco products.

Nicotine addiction per se (or caffeine addiction) can be harmful to people, but the scale of harm is orders of magnitude away from the harms of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In small doses and in moderation, nicotine alone (e.g. taken as patch or gum) can be an effective medication, is not especially addictive, and has relatively mild side effects. https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

Side effects of vaping should be studied more carefully (and the contents of vape fluid should be regulated): it is dramatically less harmful than smoking but plausibly still harmful. A massive quick dose of some stimulant (e.g. downing several espresso shots in a row) is not the most effective, and breathing stuff other than air is generally a bad idea.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#345

Post by RandallBrown »

wayoutthere wrote: post #292
JohnBooty wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirel…

> But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise. That used to be a fear of mine, but after deleting my account I’ve found it to be a core feature. It forces me to be intentional with my relationships; if I want to stay in touch with someone I have to make the effort. Otherwise, the relationship is likely more parasocial than actively…

Being able to passively keep in touch with many of the thousands of people I've met in my life is incredibly valuable to me.

It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships die because you're focusing your energies on the people that are currently around you.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#346

Post by ethbr0 »

syntheticnature wrote: post #324
ethbr0 wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future. AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation. And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because i…

It's off-to-the-side of your main point, but AOL Instant Messenger shut down in December 2017. Per https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/12/14/67582/aol-instan... it was down to 500,000 active users a month the summer before it was shut down.

In a trip down memory lane, https://www.aol.com/ is just... a pop news site now? Per Wayback, they shifted away from portal around 2010/11.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#347

Post by slingnow »

baby wrote: post #323
VladimirGolovin wrote: post #9

Heroin is already way past a reputational point of no return, but people are still using it.

It's funny because most people here spend way too much time on HN, not FB. And yeah too much HN is detrimental to your mental health.

Citation needed.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#348

Post by lostlogin »

breadzeppelin__ wrote: post #29
shoto_io wrote: 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…

> 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 something like CNN, or would you spend significantly less directly targeting "oldsters who need meds" on FB or Goog's platforms?

You’re probably already aware but this only applies in the US (and a few other small places like New Zealand).

Direct to consumer drug advertising is fraught with issues and therefore banned in most the world.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/harvard-health-ad-watch-...

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#349

Post by biztos »

revel wrote: post #328

Not sure if any of you folks have tried asking your friends which companies they wouldn't work for, irrespective of the pay, but it's interesting. Facebook and Palantir are the 2 recurring names whenever I've asked around. That was before the latest 3 or 4 rounds of scandal. FB has been in this area for years.

And yet, the one person I know who actually works there is the most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for the part about working for Zuck.

Sample size of one, but I often wonder if I should just imagine what half a million bucks a year looks like and extrapolate from there. Probably lots of people “wouldn’t” work for FB except that they already do.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#350

Post by chicob »

I can't go past the general tone of this article.

The article acknowledges that Facebook made mistakes, and that its internal reports prove the company knows the harm it can do to vulnerable teenagers. Then these issues are discarded. Apparently, Facebook even had some growth after all...

But lying to advertisers? This is deemed as unacceptable, and flagged as a possible beginning of the end.

I know this is the Economist, but when it comes to reputational points of no return, I think that vulgar remark regarding early users' trust did the job.

Post reply on HN