131–140 of 300 posts
There's propaganda slogans/posters like this all over the Meta offices. One of them is "This is now your company". When the layoffs started happening, I started seeing these mocked, "This is no longer your company", etc.
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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…
I think FB turned the corner when Mark stopped driving his Acura. I'm not sure when I last saw it at building 16, but that was the date for me.
Almost like a "I don't owe, but I should pay more, but I don't owe..." thought process that leads to moral vapor lock.
I think there used to be more release valves for this pressure. There aren't any tithing billionaires, for example.
I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.
Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.
What we're seeing in tech today feels like it started in the 80's, and before that point computers, etc. were viewed by some as the downfall of humankind and by others the saviour.
I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.
FB has done a lot of great things. There just aren't any articles written about them.
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Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time. A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension i…
I have a serious problem with calling everything social media and (more importantly) how it spells doom for this that and the other If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff
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Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time. A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension i…
I have a serious problem with calling everything social media and (more importantly) how it spells doom for this that and the other If you want to criticize specific companies - yeah. But I literally do not understand what people are talking about when employing the usual "Social media was a mistake" type stuff
One of the big selling points of Bluesky right now is that it does not do this and that is why it feels so much like 2010-era Twitter.
Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?
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There _was_ backlash. It just didn't operationalize very effectively. For instance, news organizations mostly saw FB and Google as a way to undermine and ultimately replace vetted news with unvetted, unprofessional hot takes. Anyone above a certain age likely saw these viewpoints and agreed with them but not enough to start a movement. When facebook became generally available I was maybe 14-15, and even back then I r…
The problem regarding news orgs is that they have previously sounded the alarm about bloggers, insisting that the sky was going to fall down now that any random person was allowed to just say anything they wanted and have other people read it! But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The ne…
There's propaganda slogans/posters like this all over the Meta offices. One of them is "This is now your company". When the layoffs started happening, I started seeing these mocked, "This is no longer your company", etc.
I'm sure they knew this was propaganda. The little red book is a very clear reference (just do a search for "little red book" if anyone doesn't recognize the reference).
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A little red book full of quotations from the chairman... Where else did I see this?
Is it too early to start a first print of paulgraham.com? I want mine signed. I hope the cover is orange.
When I attempted this once, I couldn't get the pages to be formatted nicely like a book, and the number of pages I ended up with was close to 1500 or something along those lines, which ends up costing you $100+ to print out with one of these services.
However I suspect that if someone were to typeset the essays nicely, it'd be an amazing coffee table book.