beser hacker ever
Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#122,lmlknm
/ ,'.mn.?' ml,
//. .'.lm' /
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#123I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…
I have an example. We built a feature that would be good for users. However we found out that it would result in lost revenue. The decision of whether to keep the feature got bounced up management. Eventually we were told to can the feature and that the decision was made at the very top. Keeping it would have affected quarterly revenues. So no go.
That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been there, obviously not to the level of a facebook board member. IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home. To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset…
I disagree and think it is significantly different. Facebook decision makers have way more agency in the directions their company takes than a consumer has in their choice of clothes to buy at Target (or wherever). Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child labor? How would an individu…
Why couldn't you choose where to buy your shirt. Shirts can be made anywhere it should be one of the easiest to find multiple venders for.
If you are saying at walmart or another big place they only have 4 brands in your price range and how can you tell which ones involve child labor. You could research if you cared.. by not buying a brand you reduce your risk by 99%.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#125I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…
From my experience there are very strong currents in a group that are very hard to go against as an individual. Only very contrarian people will go against the grain in formal meetings with high level executives or other individuals with status in a group. This is why often big organizations are able to produce decisions that the team behind it doesn't agree with and that look silly from the outside. Many people in s…
As a programmer I am not responsible (and paid) for management decisions. It is also not my job to fix toxic culture in a company.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, a company which owns large chunks of India and has a well-used private army numbering in the tens of thousands, is a great analogy for a social-media company. The East India Company was responsible, at least in part, for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the actual damage done by t…
While I appreciate the invocation of Godwin's law, Facebook is absolutely a private empire with an empire; in context of modern society.
You're not going to convince me (or hopefully, anyone) that an institution with an army that actually goes about the business of conquering and killing people, has any moral equivalence with a misguided (and I'm not contesting, destructive) social media company.
We can say that things are bad, while at the same time admitting that in the past, people did far worse things. It's a new, different, less-bad-but-still-bad, thing. It's OK.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#127Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently. Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately). One day, your brilliant data scientist…
No, it would not be my job to decide which discussions should a user be driven to.
If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.
Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook internal memo by Andrew Bosworth, VP June 18, 2016 The Ugly We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly. We connect people. That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide. So we connect more people That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to…
I read that discussion as it was happening on the internal FB@work. Oh man, there were so many true believers replying about how this was so wise and inspiring. As far as I remember, no one questioned him. I wish I had posted that in a biological context, something that grows without bound or care for its environment is cancer. There is Boz arguing that Facebook is cancer.
Cancer is just a specialized case of evolution that in many instances is turbocharged by genetic instability...essentially the biological form of 'move fast and break things'. This results a very adaptive germline that handily outcompetes everything constrained by purpose while also overcoming novel threats thrown at it by the greatest medical minds of our time.
If it didn't kill people that we love we'd marvel at its capability.
Is Facebook a 'cancer'? I think it's more of a cultural radiological device that exposes the cancer that's already there.
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#129I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged
No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".
That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]
There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]
Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.
I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...
[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-en...
Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the beta roles (because I can't help mapping wolf/pack behavior to most corp meetings anymore) about all a person can do is mount a weak defense. Which gets ignored by upper mgmt as they justify ASPD with a framework that says the number one priority is the corporate profit statement. What percentage of people in these meetings are so wealthy they can risk everything over morally gray area decisions like this? Fu…
Few people in such a meeting are "risk[ing] everything". I've quit jobs rather than doing sketchy things. For people in these industries, there's always a next job.
I don't think this is a question of someone doing "sketchy" things. Its a question of someone in the room questioning a morally questionable action, being implemented by a part of the organization as a whole. Quiting over it, or whatever likely doesn't even have an effect. Someone on the team required to implement it is going to follow the bosses orders. This appears to have happened a few times with members of the US president's cabinet over the past few years.
So, its more a "stay and fight" or "get rolled over and threaten/quit" decision. I'm betting most people just weigh the monthly mortgage payment against that and they raise the issue, but it doesn't get pushed beyond the discussion phase. If this goes on long enough, they switch jobs, or they become that person that just keeps their head down and do what they are told.