Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#171

Post by c0vfefe » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #138

dominotw wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so effective advertising does require surveillance? Is there way to to know if companies like FB would be sustainable without surveillance or would they simply die out ? in other words, would banning surveillance business kill FB, Google ect? Would we still want that law if that was the case?

newspapers, have done just fine without it for several hundred years. Radio and TV likewise can't do it. Duck Duck Go doesn't use it and they do okay. There is a lot more money in surveillance based advertising, but it isn't the only way.

It hasn't been technologically possible until recently, and now that it is, businesses are strongly incentivized to use it, in order to keep up with the growth of competitors that do used tracked advertising.

Privacy-focused mass-market products like DDG and Firefox will very rarely be able to keep up with the giants that prioritize profit. As long as users disregard their privacy, there'll be businesses ready to entice them with customized features, and of course advertisers will reward that too. That's why regulation is the only real way out (GDPR, etc.).

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#172

Post by mrlala » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

patwolf wrote: post #64

"Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But his company is a threat to our economy and democracy." "Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks." I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when someone is defined simply as "good". It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good". For example, if w…

>a) Mark selfishly disregards privacy for the growth of the company. (bad)

You say that as if "disregarding privacy" is.. well.. bad? Most people don't care about privacy as much as you probably do. It's not that he disregards all privacy, just after a certain level most people really don't care about that level of privacy that he's able to extract value from.

So I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when it assumes that everyone should have the same care about privacy as you do.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#173

Post by clairity » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

patwolf wrote: post #64

"Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But his company is a threat to our economy and democracy." "Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks." I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when someone is defined simply as "good". It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good". For example, if w…

“good guy” here is social code for “guy i don’t really want to piss off” and is akin to grinning in other primates. the phrase is disingenuous in most cases.

this american life did a whole show on “good guys”[0] (including exploiting the “good guy discount”).

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/515/good-guys

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#174

Post by cat199 » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

toss1 wrote: post #132

patwolf wrote: post #64

"Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But his company is a threat to our economy and democracy." "Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks." I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when someone is defined simply as "good". It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good". For example, if w…

Indeed! Let's be clear, the issues go far beyond clicks, but the ways that Zuckerberg, Dorsey, and the others in similar roles in the industry have, at best, failed to notice (and thereby allowed) how their platforms to be exploited to manipulate society. At best, Zuckerberg is a Useful Idiot (in the Vladmir Lenin sense), easily manipulated into tasks that, in this case undermine democracy and make the world safer fo…

Though you didn't explicitly say it, since all examples relate to russia and rubles.. this isn't a russia problem, it's a social media problem.

Plenty of US, Chinese, Saudi, Israeli, ABC, XYZ, PQ oligarchs manipulating public opinion via social media to suit their own political objectives.

Depending on the time and the situation, one country or another may/may not have more 'skin in the game' depending on the contextual stakes.. and their 'scary' involvement will likely be highlighted or ignored in the media based on congruence / conformity to the existing geopolitical status quo and editorial bias of the publisher..

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#175

Post by dredmorbius » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

mathgeek wrote: post #99

patwolf wrote: post #64

"Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But his company is a threat to our economy and democracy." "Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks." I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when someone is defined simply as "good". It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good". For example, if w…

"X is a good person, but ..." is simply something that a lot of people have been taught to do when they want to criticize someone but don't want to appear to be entirely negative (without necessarily having anything nice to say about the person). It's a common strategy to try to come off as more polite, especially when your statement is written or will be quoted. A common aphorism that approximates this is "you catch…

This. Soften up (and appeal to) your target.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#176

Post by MangezBien » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

jondubois wrote: post #92

Why is this article not being upvoted more? It's probably the most important piece that has ever been posted to HN; especially considering who the author is.

Look at the comments here. This website is essentially a bunch of Ayn Rand novels come to life.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#177

Post by username223 » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:53 PM UTC

mathgeek wrote: post #99

patwolf wrote: post #64

"Mark Zuckerberg is a good guy. But his company is a threat to our economy and democracy." "Mark is a good, kind person. But I’m angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks." I always find it difficult to take an argument seriously when someone is defined simply as "good". It glosses over a lot of things, like what motivates a person and how we define "good". For example, if w…

"X is a good person, but ..." is simply something that a lot of people have been taught to do when they want to criticize someone but don't want to appear to be entirely negative (without necessarily having anything nice to say about the person). It's a common strategy to try to come off as more polite, especially when your statement is written or will be quoted. A common aphorism that approximates this is "you catch…

I prefer the Southern convention of appending "... bless his heart." "Mark is just a sociopath hell-bent on world domination, bless his heart."

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#178

Post by blululu » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

3jckd wrote: post #43

One one hand side, I agree that Facebook/Amazon/Apple etc. but also many telcoms are way too big which in turn stifles fair competition and leads to monopolies (and subsequently abuse of power, lobbying etc). On the other, there has not been one good solution proposed to this so far. Let's run through the options (accumulated over months or years of discussions): 1) Split FB into the FB-Instagram-WhatsApp trio that w…

Agreed that the solutions proposed thus far do nothing to address the problems. Even if we tore the company apart brick by brick there are no guarantees that we wouldn't have the exact same problems resurface in 5 years under a different company. Prehaps we should focus about ways to increase the transparency and accountability of any Media/Telecom platform.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#179

Post by jmastrangelo » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

basch wrote: post #154

jmastrangelo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your premise that breaking up FB, WA and IG doesn't really do anything (I made a much longer comment about this in a reply above). But what would breaking up facebook even mean then? Fundamentally there's no equivalent to the geographic breakup, as physical natural monopolies emerge because you can only have one company per unit of natural resource. Facebook is a monopoly because of network effects, and…

Its absolutely possible to break facebook up horizontally. And if the government were to explore a breakup, its the way they should go. Company 1 would be a Social Networking and Hosting PaaS from hardware, networking, bandwidth, databases, serverless workers to services like ads, anti-evil, localization, social graph, development tools, frameworks, runtimes. Company 1, would be THE place to build a social network, i…

I think the idea of your "company 1" is actually super interesting, essentially social Graph as a Service(GAAS?). But , I don't think that addresses any of the issues people actually have with facebook. What does facebook running both the front and backend of their site have to do with their market power?

That company 1 would still retain 90% of Facebooks value, as it would be the social graph where people acknowledge their real life connections. It would still have all the privacy liabilities, in fact Facebook's largest scandal (Cambridge Analytics) was due to the face they were too open with the social graph! And that it was misused! If we're selling the social graph now can't there be a million politically oriented "research operations" that spring up and use it?

Also, FB, IG and WA all have separate social graphs, them being frontend skins on one service doesn't reflect that. So they'd likely be completely separate companies full stop, maybe using a couple services from GAAS like spam algos. Sure new, potentially better frontends for FB could pop up with more specialized niches, but facebook is already exploring that with messenger and events getting their own apps and sites.

Re: Chris Hughes Says It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

#180

Post by thebigspacefuck » Thu, May 09, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #108

Better than breaking up social networks would be to force them to interoperate on an open protocol. When I first signed up for Facebook I was disappointed that only other Facebook users could see my account. Then when Google+ came on the scene I thought they'd worked out a way to interoperate with Facebook, but instead Google just wanted their own silo. What we really need is for social networks to interoperate the w…

On Facebook's "Download your information", it says "Download a copy of your information to keep, or to transfer to another service". Is there another service to transfer to? Maybe something using ActivityPub like Mastodon? I can't find one.

There are third party apps that allow you to post to Facebook and check your Facebook status. Couldn't that other service post to Facebook and Mastodon on your behalf and read your friends profiles? I can't think of a reason it isn't technically possible for something like that to be created, but I haven't seen it created yet.