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Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

economist.com

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Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#181

MSM rallying against FB in coordination. They want piece of that ad money. While tiktok seems to be main app which is ruining children.

Yeah this is the biggest reason they're so interested in the "whistleblower" who essentially said nothing we already didn't know and had zero data to backup her claims.

MSM wants their dwindling market share back. I don't like facebook and I don't use it. However, everyone should be wary of the reason there's such a big push by politicians to censor it more and why MSM backs this so much.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#182
post #138
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah right. All moral quandaries get resolved while working for AANG.

Well, perhaps just the N, then. But Netflix has always been the odd-duck in FAANG. (And yes, you can point out reasons not to work at Netflix, but it seems like a whole nother level than the rest of FAANG.)

There's been a couple Netflix public outrage instances. Like when they split up their pricing plan for streaming and DVDs, or the backlash over Cuties. But Netflix is still going strong.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#183
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right. Two crowds are critical though: - this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident. - this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have t…

That management pool isn’t going anywhere. Have a bunch of friends who work at FB, mostly immigrants. They don’t care about the reputation, or don’t have the luxury to. No one confronts them about why they work there at dinner parties. It pays the bills very well and allows them to buy nice houses and send their kids to private school. It’s the lack of work/life balance that gets to them, not the reputation of the em…

If they came to capitalist America knowing of its history, they're probably A-OK with being politically abhorrent.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see the adoption of AWS and related services potentially making Amazon so indispensable to the world's governments and banks that its failure might result in disaster, but I don't think any of Facebook's services qualifies. Unless you're referring to general financial consequences that the failure of any successful company might bring, but that doesn't really make it "too big to fail".

I mentioned it in my post. Facebook has a near-monopoly on social media networks. If a new one comes up, they'll just buy it. Obvious outlier is Tiktok right now, remains to be seen what happens with them though.

That still doesn’t make it “too big to fail”, which is a specific phrase referring to organizations whose failure might have disastrous financial consequences.

Their recent outage resulted in some monetary losses, but it didn’t crash the dollar.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#185
A few things:

0. Whistleblowing is a real shitty strategy for enacting change. How about actually fighting for it from the inside first?

1. "Think of the children", really? Maybe the answer is children shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised but that's hardly Facebook's problem.

2. I hate misinformation as much as the next guy, but whether people like to believe in stupid shit like the magnetizing effect of vaccines is up to them. The fact that they believe in this shit is a failure of the educational system and our society in general. For better or worse, free speech is the cornerstone of American society, and again it's hardly Facebook's problem.

3. If people resort to Facebook for their daily "news" consumption, that speaks more of the abject failure of traditional media than it does of Facebook's nefarious motives. Maybe fix the tragic decline of journalism in this country before trying to single out one Tech organization as the scapegoat du jour.

(Throwaway because it's hard to have an opinion these days without being judged. I'm a vaccinated immigrant who hates being an Independent because that mostly means the two alternatives are shitty)

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#186
post #3

No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for. But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group. And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.

Article doesn't disagree with your take: "The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Even if its ageing customers stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle."

>The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff.

So any institution that's considered repugnant by young liberals can now breezily be compared to big tobacco? Should the Republican party restructure its platform so that it can have snazzier candidate webpages?

Big tobacco is big tobacco because the product is widely seen as addictive and harmful, even by its biggest users. The nuance needed to argue that Facebook is bad but Twitter and Reddit are fine will never have this sort of broad appeal. Social media for me but not for thee?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#187
post #3

No. That’s what people like us and all the main stream media hope for. But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group. And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.

> most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook. The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre/Diem be…

> Libre/Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought it to the table

This was always a terrible idea, and would have died regardless of who had proposed it. From the people I talked to (i knew some people on the core team) it seemed to be a retirement home for FB execs who didn't want to do useful work anymore.

(I don't disagree with your overall point, just stating that it's not the sole predictor).

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#188
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook went down for 6 hours and they are back to using it the next day without a second of hesitation. Maybe WhatsApp was affected by some people who, so I've heard, rely on it heavily. They may have (smartly) switched to a more decentralized platform to handle their critical communications. So did they shed some edge-case users? Sure. Will it matter in the long run? Not at all.

> Facebook went down for 6 hours and they are back to using it the next day without a second of hesitation. Why is that relevant at all? If I have a blackout for six hours, I'm gonna go back to using electricity once it's back.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say inertia and unawareness of the FAANG salary market on the supply-side, and ageism and preference for demographic diversity over experiential diversity on the demand-side.

TBH A range of ages is demographic diversity. No idea why it's forgotten about sometimes.

I suspect there isn't an even subconscious effort to exclude people of age, but that it's a side effect of the FAANG interview process. People who have been in the industry for decades don't care to learn to do leetcode interviews when they can get paid perfectly well somewhere either based on connections, or by going through interviews more centered around job experience. That said, I doubt a person making 60k somewhere would have made it in to a FAANG at any point. Making that little in the modern tech market shows either a lack of skill, a lack of desire to improve one's salary, or a need to live and work in a location where there aren't many opportunities for employment. There are plenty of non-faang places that are desperately hiring for 6 figure salaries at this point.
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