Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook's Little Red Book

map.cv

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 300 posts

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#191

Post by mathgenius »

sfblah wrote: post #157
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're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.

People thought the invention of the telegraph was going to bring about world peace.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#192

Post by mbostleman »

wyclif wrote: post #181
pie420 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i'm sure there's lots of tech optimists in absolute numbers, but my personal experience in the bay area has been that a vast majority of my friends in tech and tech adjacent have become highly pessimistic of the current tech landscape, AI, VR, etc.

All you have to do to see this is to look at how some of the biggest tech CEOs and moguls like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, Elon, Jeff Bezos, etc. treat giving their children screens to babysit them. Pretty sure most of them don't, because they know how bad that is.

I’m looking forward to when tech is not synonymous with screens.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#193

Post by longdustytrail »

PaulHoule wrote: post #144
gosub100 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

When I started at Facebook one of things everyone did during orientation was to put up a diff changing the default text of the search bar at the top of the homepage. This was a good way to familiarize people with the end to end flow of making changes. They didn’t say this explicitly but I think it was also intended to give people a “holy shit” moment when you realize that your silly code change is one button press away from 10 figure page views.

The idea was you make the change, take a screenshot of the result on your dev instance, get it stamped by your “mentor” and then abandon it. AFAIK this had been going on for a while before I got there.

Fast forward a few months and I see a sev pop up. “Default text on www.facebook.com search bar says ‘I am a search bar!’”

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#194

Post by JumpCrisscross »

cdchn wrote: post #91
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP didn’t make a statement about the facts on the ground, but the culture and myths of the time. (If you think the villainy myths we tell ourselves today are more grounded in truth, they’re not. We’re always in a narrative. And there is nothing wrong with collective narratives.)

Narrative is the correct word for what this is. This is what Facebook leadership wanted to persuade the Facebook rank-and-file that _this_ is what they're about. This is purposeful internal propaganda.

There is always a narrative. It’s how our brains synthesise. The existence of a narrative is neither deifying nor damning.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#196

Post by zombiwoof »

mathgenius wrote: post #191
sfblah wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're likely too young to remember anything much before 2012. Honestly, this stuff has been around for 50 years. Go watch a video about Steve Jobs at NeXT from the 1980s.

People thought the invention of the telegraph was going to bring about world peace.

The thing we find out is: when we connect people it doesn’t mean they will get along. See Europeans and Native American Indians.

See Catholics and Protestant See Muslim and Jews

No form of communication would have stopped the racism, inabilities to see other cultures and work together

People suck. Connecting them doesn’t result in utopia

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#197

Post by wnolens »

programmertote wrote: post #152
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.

Amazon also likes to tout their way of doing things as Amazon's peculiar culture. Some practices like reading the design proposal doc before starting the discussion about it looks right in general sense, but it usually turns out that almost all people who are invited to these meetings don't actually read that doc (instead are busy working on their tasks) or don't really have the depth to understand what's written in…

I actually think this is one of the few (only?) good Amazon practices.

Anyone who can't grok the doc in 30 mins is unlikely to ever open it, and if they do and spend a few hours on it, chances are they don't have much to add and it only served to educate themselves.

Instead, you give it your best shot, surrounded by others which helps to focus/eliminate distraction and then get to listen to someone with far more depth critique it - and you get to learn their framing and about a ton of nuance you would never have taken away otherwise.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#199

Post by po »

Historically, those who controlled the media controlled the message. If you're the only one with a printing press, you control what people read. Same with radio. Same with TV.

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

Man, Zuckerberg would be rolling over in his grave if he saw what happened in the following years and our current engagement/algorithmically-driven media ecosystem.

I find this book to be a bit sad. I do believe they were trying to do all of this stuff but it definitely went off the rails.

Post reply on HN