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Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#161

Post by jmyeet »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

Facebook had the same kind of noble mission Google once had. Google's mission was to make information universally accessible. Facebook's was to connect people.

There are lots of reasons FB beat MySpace. MySpace was really a different product. It was focused on your homepage, really. Facebook was one of the first to introduce an algorithmic feed. I would also disagree that people were "tricked" into using their real names. This greatly helped with discoverability and it's actually what most people want.

As for Facebook scraping third-party sites... citation needed. I mean this was great for Facebook's advertising business but it's really no different to the DoubleClick (and ultimately Google) pixel, which is to say it's a high-level profile of pages you visit (that have the pixel).

As for the games, Facebook didn't kill those. Mobile did. And I'm sorry, but nothing will make me feel sorry for Mark Pincus and Zynga [1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3218774

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#162

Post by firstplacelast »

tasuki wrote: post #100

Yes, well, she was fired. I'm sure she's completely unbiased. If it was so bad, why did she work there? She was a senior executive, not a wage-slave.

I unfortunately agree with this take, but her (probably) being a crappy person and looking to monetize her experience is exactly why she worked there and there is likely a lot of truth there under her bias.

Years ago, an acquaintence was an exec at a tech company that imploded in a semi-public way. He decided he wanted to get a documentary made on the whole thing and sent me his pitch. A little too self-aggrandizing, which I pointed out among other things. Couple years go by and a doc did come out on it (not his), uncovers some shady things and lawsuits against the CEO…and a little bit of embezzlement on his part.

So I think you’re right on the money, there’s a reason she worked there. Sucky/shady company and she fit in well.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#163

Post by rsynnott »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic?

People who work there often seem to (or at least used to years ago), though I could never really figure out why.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#164

Post by pixl97 »

latexr wrote: post #137
anal_reactor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people who drank the kool-aid is astonishing. To the same tune, I think that if you tell people that politicians lie, majority of them will be deeply shocked, hurt, and offended.

I’m not sure that’s true in general. I see many people do the polar opposite: spout “every politician is the same, they’re all crooks”. Which isn’t helpful either. Could be a generational or cultural thing, though.

I mean, you're both probably correct.

In the US a huge portion of the population doesn't vote, I would expect those that think every politician is a crook.

The other side that does vote thinks the other politician lies and their politician is the good one.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#165

Post by MiddleEndian »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

>the idealistic Twitter

Never saw Twitter as idealistic. Seems to just want to show you celebrity gossip. Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start, and really pioneered the attempts at trying to continuously grab people's attention as opposed to just being a tool. Not really a defense of Zuck's products as a whole as Instagram seems to be the same.

>Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names

That was (and is) a fantastic feature, and I remember being aware of it when I signed up. It was super easy to meet people in real life then find them on Facebook, and then invite them to future events in real life or keep track of what they're up to.

Also Myspace allowing HTML resulted in a bunch of entirely unreadable pages. And the Myspace extended friend network didn't really work because everyone was friends with Myspace Tom (who by all means seems to be a chill guy IRL)

>Remember the apps, like zombie games? Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs.

If anything, Facebook was too friendly to third party devs (which does track with your comparison with Amazon, which I think is far too friendly to third party sellers). Third party apps are anti-features IMO. Should've just stuck to its core functionality, connecting you with people you know, and showing you content from groups that you have chosen to join (which you can still get in your newsfeed if you aggressively block and hide almost everything, which I do lol)

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#166

Post by coliveira »

latexr wrote: post #122
theK wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while she should have been aware that she makes her own decisions, she might also have been aware of what happens, if she does. I don't understand. In my world view, owning your decisions includes understanding the paths those decisions might lead to and finding your ~piece~peace with that. EDIT: s/piece/peace/

> EDIT: s/piece/peace/ This is a minor typo whose real intent was still understandable, you fixed it right away, and no one had replied yet. Adding the fake strike through and edit note makes your post a bit harder and more inconvenient to read with no advantage. You can just edit it in place, there would be no harm to it.

You're completely right. It is an annoyance in this site to see people listing very small edits as if something important was happening.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#167

Post by jeswin »

mschuster91 wrote: post #89
rajman187 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> other than a bit of open source (PyTorch and React are nice, I guess) Not to detract from your main point but I think this misses a lot of contributions, eg Cassandra, Hive, Presto, GraphQL, the plethora of publications coming out of FAIR (fundamental AI research) and of course the Llama family of models which have enabled quite a few developments themselves

At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung. And for the other projects, their paths are littered with the dead bodies of engineers who had been ordered to chase down one of Facebook's hype technologies just because "Facebook does it so we can follow their best example".

> At least with GraphQL I think the world would be better off if it had never seen the light of day. It's a steaming pile of hyper complex dung.

Of course not. GraphQL has vastly simplified our backend development, and has also resulted in better coordination between backend and frontend teams. There are so many things which GraphQL gets right - TYPES and schemas, traversing entity relationships, selectively querying fields, builtin API explorer etc. We use REST only for super trivial projects.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#168

Post by tucnak »

On a different note; it's funny how otherwise reasonable people (on HN but also in general) become stereotypical gossiping girls whenever there's expose on %famous_person% or a cheap ideological position to have fun with. Woah, corporate America sure rewards the fucked-up people! We do, indeed, live in a society. Chirp chirp

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#169

Post by ghaff »

wisty wrote: post #45

> A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? As far as I can tell, they've always been basically Amazon (the borg that will win at all costs) but a little more trivial, cool and Web2.0, they were never the "don't be evil" Google, the idealistic Twitter, I can't think of many less ideal driven companies. Facebook beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into usi…

I more or less agree with a lot of whaat you wrote, but I'd argue for an ostensibly personal social network, real names are mostly a positive.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#170

Post by UncleMeat »

max_ wrote: post #12
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

>Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... What should be the maximum of how big someone should be? Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".

I don't know what the maximum wealth should be, but I do know that it is lower than one billion dollars. So let's start there.

Billionaires are bad for society.

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