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Facebook's Little Red Book

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Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#181

Post by wyclif »

pie420 wrote: post #163
jonas21 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.

i'm sure there's lots of tech optimists in absolute numbers, but my personal experience in the bay area has been that a vast majority of my friends in tech and tech adjacent have become highly pessimistic of the current tech landscape, AI, VR, etc.

All you have to do to see this is to look at how some of the biggest tech CEOs and moguls like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Elon, Jeff Bezos, etc. treat giving their children screens to babysit them. Pretty sure most of them don't, because they know how bad that is.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#182

Post by ncpa-cpl »

dluan wrote: post #153

Facebook somehow acquiring 小红书 would actually be a prescient move, but even that era seems forever ago.

I came looking for this,

Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#183

Post by fragmede »

PaulHoule wrote: post #144
gosub100 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB has done a lot of great things. There just aren't any articles written about them.

From the viewpoint of developer culture I think Facebook is better night and day than Google. Google's culture is hire 15 geniuses from the Ivy League with 130+ IQ and make them fight with a 40 minute C++ build and a balky Kubernetes culture because "we only hire the best"; YouTube and the advertising system are a money printing machine, the team works for 3.5 years at something that get canceled at the last minute.…

Microsoft stumbled into OpenAI and Google stumbled into Waymo. What's Facebook got?

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#184

Post by fragmede »

ajkjk wrote: post #174
paxys wrote: post #52

I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece…

Most of us felt exactly the same way about it then that we do now. The only difference is that fewer people take that cringy utopianism seriously now.

Is that based on any sort of actual data or are you just going off the scientifically supported totally unbiased data collection method known as ~:/vibes/:~ ?

I imagine the future looked pretty bleak during world war I, and then again during II, and maybe something else during the civil rights movement, or there was also the cold war. Cynics and optimists have existed since there was something to have feelings about. what's different about today to say that the cynics outweigh the optimists, in a way they never could in the past before?

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#185

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #141
emilfihlman wrote: post #130

It's refreshing to see it said out loud today as an ideal, even if they didn't really believe it then nor today, the idea on page 24: "But what happens when everyone can put their message in front of a lot of people? When the playing field is level? When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to, Influence can no longer be owned, It must be earned." I wish people believ…

They should have known that if they built a giant centralized platform, the government would eventually come knocking.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#186

Post by dluan »

ncpa-cpl wrote: post #182
dluan wrote: post #153

Facebook somehow acquiring 小红书 would actually be a prescient move, but even that era seems forever ago.

I came looking for this, Is the Chinese instagram’s name, Little Red Book (小红书), related to Facebook’s Little Red Book, or just a coincidence?

lol, 小红书 as an idea was established way before facebook.

facebook was just trying to use an adbuster's style approach, but actually during that time there were tons of subversive messages, e.g. mckenzie wark's "hacker manifesto" was commonly read and discussed. that whole hacker-chic is what facebook and PG modeled their entire personality off of. even though they might not have cared about edgy communism back then, the GNU manifesto written 20 years even earlier (and lots of FOSS warriors) certainly did.

even back when facebook had their little print poster shop on their campus, a lot of hackers outside felt really grody seeing this anti-capitalist spirit co-opted by this financial behemoth. it was like every 2 weeks someone would know someone else's small startup get snapped up for $10s of millions here and there. it was like watching the air slowly get sucked out of a party.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#187

Post by ninth_ant »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #172
ninth_ant wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my god, no. Zuck had — and I believe still has — complete control of the company. Demonizing Sandberg and lionizing Zuckerberg is a complete disservice to reality. It was the focus on growth and not money that ruined everything. Many changes occurred in this period. I was there. A big change is that ads became profitable. I think it’s fair to say this change was sudden. Facebook went from being scrappy and underfu…

> The most crucial damage had already happened — people gave up on trust that Facebook could handle their data responsibly, and trust that they’d have a good experience on the site. I think it was also that people were beginning to see the consequences of “over sharing” with people you’d never normally share things with. The vision of connecting everybody sounds great but not everybody needs, wants or even should hea…

You’re right about how this decline happened.

But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform.

There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#188

Post by adamontherun »

fragmede wrote: post #183
PaulHoule wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the viewpoint of developer culture I think Facebook is better night and day than Google. Google's culture is hire 15 geniuses from the Ivy League with 130+ IQ and make them fight with a 40 minute C++ build and a balky Kubernetes culture because "we only hire the best"; YouTube and the advertising system are a money printing machine, the team works for 3.5 years at something that get canceled at the last minute.…

Microsoft stumbled into OpenAI and Google stumbled into Waymo. What's Facebook got?

Orion

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#189

Post by mettamage »

sfblah wrote: post #157
paxys wrote: post #52

I think people here are too young to remember the tech industry in 2012. None of the images and ideas conveyed in this book (printing press, cave art, fall of the Berlin wall, Arab Spring, particle accelerators) were outlandish for the time and space it was printed in. Tech was all about optimism and idealism. Everyone in silicon valley knew they were changing the world for the better, and tech was the missing piece…

You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.

True, but for me, the techno-optimism started with Google. I was a young kid back then, but the idea to catalog all of the world's information under a search engine (that worked) sounded wild to me at the time.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#190

Post by mettamage »

oooyay wrote: post #162

Since this election has unfolded I've been thinking a lot about narratives and what they mean. Progress is largely based on narratives. They're the stories we tell ourselves to stay focused, motivated, and aligned. The narrative doesn't have to be true, it just needs to be a convincing story grounded in some reality (as it would seem). That got me thinking about the function of narratives versus truths, how they're r…

Yea, I was just thinking that.

Truth is a narrative too. There's one difference though: over time, truth will play out.

Simple example: blood moon occurs, people think they'll die. And then the next morning comes around.

With social systems, the truth takes a lot of time to truly unfold, but unfold it does.

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