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

sfgate.com

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

#201

Post by firefax »

KaiserPro wrote: post #134
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 beat MySpace IMO because it tricked people into using real names No, FB was a much better product, it was far more connected, any way easier to talk and make friends online. It also was a lot more reliable. > Facebook was not kind to 3rd party devs. Indeed, they were not kind, mainly because they realised, way too late, that the API they had designed gave third parties way too much access to the "social gr…

>FB was a much better product

FB used to have granular privacy controls and no "feed" -- you wrote on someone's wall, they wrote on yours, and people had to actively click on your profile to see the messages rather than have them thrust front and center.

FB abandoned that commitment to privacy and has suffered as a result.

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

#202

Post by latexr »

ForHackernews wrote: post #146
latexr wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Has anyone ever seen Facebbok as idealistic? That’s how Zuckerberg painted it, and no doubt there were people who bought it, at least internally. See the red book. https://www.map.cv/blog/redbook

>Zuckerberg's Law: The amount each person shares double each year. Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false. I (and most people I know) are posting ("sharing") less and less. Faced with a surveillance panopticon, I think many normal people are opting out. Peer-to-peer networks are withering. The internet is reverting to the format of traditional media, with two distinct classes of broadcasters ('influencers') and…

> Anecdotally, this is almost certainly false.

That law exists at least since 2008, over a decade and a half ago. It’s plausible it was true and born from observation at the time. The first Snowden documents were published half a decade later, in 2013.

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

#203

Post by firefax »

theK wrote: post #35
kelnos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?! Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever e…

I am inclined to agree with you but I do have a bit of nuance to add. Pretty sure this is not going to be a popular opinion but I think the second POV you present is apt but dependant on hierarchy level as well as each individual's drive to succeed. From my understanding that incident happened while she was in a directorial position, not some IC level. At that level one has to constantly actively balance private life…

>flirting with the C suite

It sounds like one of the issues was that the C-Suite flirted with her

>Wynn-Williams also writes that Kaplan, as her boss, made inappropriate comments to her, including repeatedly asking where she was bleeding from after childbirth. She writes that, shortly after he called her sultry in front of other co-workers, Kaplan ground into her on a dance floor. She triggered an investigation into Kaplan and writes that she was “almost immediately” retaliated against with a cut in duties before eventually being fired. Wynn-Williams describes the investigation as a “farce.”

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

#204

Post by greg_V »

aoanevdus wrote: post #50
CaptainZapp wrote: post #4

She said Wynn-Williams’ allegations about Kaplan are false, and in a Thursday statement, she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process. (emph, mine) This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.

I’m curious what would be considered the industry standard for fact checking in tech. Does Google Search, Apple App Store, TikTok, Snapchat, Amazon store, etc. apply fact-checking to the content posted by users/sellers? Or more abstractly, is fact-checking the responsibility of authors and content editors, or of platforms and infrastructure that spread the content?

I mean if you're publishing a book, especially a tell-all one, you'd go and talk to sources familiar with the matter who can independently verify whether the statements are true or not to shield you against defamation lawsuits.

Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit

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

#205

Post by TeMPOraL »

kubb wrote: post #62
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad. Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.

> just because you don't like the person... Do we need that person to keep having the product though? > Most people don't give two fraks... They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone. But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship? The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a s…

Maybe?

I'm first to argue that, past certain size, social media platforms become de-facto town squares / utilities, and should be treated as such. But, until they are...

> Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?

... until they are, it's kind of the core axiom behind capitalism and market economy and social order in most places around the world, that this is his money, and if he wants to be "squandering the resulting cash on" (according to you) "asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse", it's his prerogative.

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

#206

Post by mschuster91 »

jeswin wrote: post #167
mschuster91 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm more of an ops person and had the misfortune having to assist an inherited Drupal/static site generator project that heavily used GraphQL. It was not fun to debug this crap, and that is my biggest issue - as if the SSG setup itself isn't already a pain in the ass, adding GraphQL to the build stack was just the icing on the cake.

(One of the issues the dev team faced was the insane amount of RAM that was consumed by the GraphQL crap in both the FE and BE containers, which was a pain to debug for the FE side because that was an ephemeral container on an EKS environment)

IMHO, GraphQL entices developers on both ends to just be lazy and throw the complexity to the other team, and Ops who has to support both teams and mediate between both sides who just blame the other side for being too dumb.

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

#207

Post by ethbr1 »

Cwizard wrote: post #154
alterom wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is routinely suggesting me contacts that I have met and interacted with offline, the only link to them being an entry in my phone book. Which, I'm guessing, I allowed Messenger to have access to at some point. Other than that, it's inference from GPS/location data, which Meta, as far as I know, didn't deny doing.

Were you ever connected to the same Wifi network? You can probably use that for tracking too.

It definitely uses connection IPs as some heuristic.

I exclusively used Facebook for family (years ago before deleting it) and received recommendations of otherwise socially-unconnected roommates who habitually accessed FB through house wifi.

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

#208

Post by MiddleEndian »

criddell wrote: post #186
MiddleEndian wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Substantially worse product than Facebook from the start I disagree. When Twitter first started taking off at SXSW twenty years ago it had very little in common with Facebook. There wasn't an algorithm, there were no ads, and there was barely a website. You just received text messages from people you followed. You mostly interacted with it via your phone and for many of us, that meant text entry on the digits keys…

I think I got an account in late 2007 or 2008, so perhaps it was different in 2006 or early 2007. But I do remember in 2009, Ashton Kutcher was in the news for having a million followers on Twitter, so the time where it was not for celebrity gossip was certainly brief.

I also generally prefer not to be notified by things on my phone if I can avoid it, computer use is more deliberate.

>You likely personally knew all the people you were tweeting with.

But I certainly knew all the people I was friends with on Facebook, they were people I first met in person, and it had their names.

I think fundamentally, I dislike the asymmetric nature of "following" people on Twitter (or Instagram or whatever). On Facebook you are friends or you are not. Obviously you can hide/mute people or whatever but the fundamental interaction is mutual.

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

#209

Post by heresie-dabord »

CaptainZapp wrote: post #4

She said Wynn-Williams’ allegations about Kaplan are false, and in a Thursday statement, she called the book “defamatory” and alleged that Wynn-Williams had skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process. (emph, mine) This, coming from a Meta spokesperson, is rather rich.

> skipped “the industry’s standard fact-checking process."

And the industry in question has compromised its host culture. What is Truth now?

This billionaire corporate sociopath suggested "Facebook remake the news ecosystem with the company at its center."

How is the corporate propaganda business working out socially and politically? I see the stock valuations — perhaps they are a measure of what has been lost in stability and community.

> "I’ve seen him face so many choices and lose touch with whatever fundamental human decency"

Including the rush to dismantle fact-checking in his corporation's product, which has become THE news source for millions of citizens.

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

#210

Post by TeMPOraL »

duxup wrote: post #196
MiddleEndian wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

IIRC, early twitter really felt like it was there to provide content you wanted. It was different at the start.

Back then, it was always different at the start. This was when digital services were built with the service, not exit, in mind.

Or maybe it's just me looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? Yet I really feel the rot wasn't always there, it set in over time and eventually encompassed all. Today, I pretty much assume that any new service is an exit-seeking scam until proven otherwise; I don't remember having much reason for that 15 years ago.

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