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Facebook's Little Red Book

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Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#141

Post by sneak »

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.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#142

Post by nitwit005 »

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 mean, the marketing was all about that.

Even non-technology companies stole a bunch of marketing buzzwords from this era that are still in use today.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#143

Post by jbl0ndie »

evanelias wrote: post #119
com2kid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was 2012. There was still hope and optimism in the tech space. The Internet had helped overturn powerful regimes and given voice to the disenfranchised. There was the idea that person to person public discourse could resolve many societal problems. Smartphones had exploded just 6 years prior and they were already making inroads into traditionally underserved and neglected communities around the world, helping fa…

Some additional context: morale at Facebook was relatively poor around this time period, partially due to the disappointing stock performance right after the IPO, as well as a one-time company-wide reduction in bonuses a bit after that. So parts of this book may have been intended to help inspire a workforce that was becoming slightly disgruntled over compensation. fwiw they were still giving the red book to all new…

There's a school of thought in change management that suggests that a time comes when current stories aren't working for the culture you're trying to move an organisation towards. A few here have said morale was low at FB right then.

At times like that, restating some important old stories and legends, salted with some useful new ones can help to galvanize people and create the culture change you want.

A good example is someone mentioned in this thread is Zuck's beat up old car. That's a great old story for the early days, but probably needed burying at the Red Book time. Clearly he's not going to drive that forever, so you need some more up to date motivational culture lore which embraces more excess while retaining how the Devs are still world-changing hackers who should work all nighters because 'we're all in this together for mankind, team'.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#144

Post by PaulHoule »

gosub100 wrote: post #98
chucknthem wrote: post #75

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.

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.

Facebook is much more oriented towards greasing the skids with the goal that a fresher developer would be able to push a change to a shared development system the first day on the job.

Look at React vs Flutter.

Like Microsoft, Google is thrashing around looking for "the next big thing", sometimes like a mindless beast. I've met person after person who told me that they went there because they believed they could make an impact and came to the conclusion within a year that they couldn't make any impact at all.

Facebook on the other hand is still run by the founder and it is pushing hard to develop a technology that he believes in even if the rest of us don't. It's a riskier strategy than Microsoft or Google who are likely to stumble on another multibillion dollar business despite themselves.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#145

Post by lupire »

lelandfe wrote: post #124
tills13 wrote: post #105

When it was produces, this was probably inspiring and effective. Retrospectively, it's a bit creepy and ominous.

And naive. "When everyone has a printing press, the ones with the best ideas are the ones people listen to" – in a room full of voices, uncommonly is the best idea heard.

Tomato, tomahto; Naive, cynical; potato, potahto.

"Best" in a Darwinian memetic sense of "optimized for reproduction and dissemination", not "accurate" or "helpful".

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#146

Post by lupire »

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…

Then they immediately turned around and started charging money to show your post to your friends. Lies piled up on lies.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#147

Post by tdeck »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #131
bagels wrote: post #121

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.

Maybe they should shop here: https://despair.com/collections/demotivators

Wow I remember seeing these in the 2000s. What a blast from the past!

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#148

Post by mattmanser »

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…

This site is from that era, a bunch of posters on this thread are registered from then or before.

There was plenty of cynicism in tech back then too, plenty of posters who always complained about 'micro$oft'. How Oracle had been corrupted, etc.

What seems to be different now is that the optimism hype fades quicker. Back then Google kept it going for years. Recently things like Tesla and OpenAI the optimism gave way to the harsh reality of greed a lot quicker.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#149

Post by UncleOxidant »

dowager_dan99 wrote: post #133
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.

You're right - but also very wrong. People can be optimistic while still having an existential crisis about what they see/feel is happening. That's what makes them believe they can influence and change the world, and why they even try. 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.

Oh, man, I can still remember how when barcodes started showing up on products in the late 70s that there were people saying it was the mark of the beast or a precursor to it or that it was some government ploy.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#150

Post by tdeck »

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…

I think the movie The Social Network was responsible for bringing this into the public consciousness, and constructing it to some extent. It kind of framed the discussion about the software industry for at least a decade.
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