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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

#241

Post by piaste »

mythrwy wrote: post #237
piaste wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association. Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money. Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further an…

Andrew Carnegie was worth something like 300 billion USD (today, inflation adjusted). So that level of wealth was not unknown by the time of the Eisenhower administration.

Good point!

On that note, trust-busting is also worth discussing as a counter to the modern concentration of wealth.

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

#242

Post by Hikikomori »

alex1138 wrote: post #227
Hikikomori wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The twittefiles nothingburger?

I really hope you don't actually work in tech and are putting your thumb on the scale of decisions

I'm European so I don't believe in absolute free speech, as you know we had a big problem with fascists, as the US now has. Do I believe that the government can be criticized? Certainly. And we do so frequently here, both online and with protests. Do you see our police cracking down on students here like in the US? No. And now US students are called terrorists because they don't support and propagate a genocide.

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

#244

Post by hulitu »

kumarvvr wrote: post #20

We still haven't found out how to use the internet to socialize, without resorting to giving power to a central entity. If there is something out there that can do this, profitably, then we can kiss these mega social giants good bye. I heard about the Blue Sky protocol, but it still feels primitive.

> We still haven't found out how to use the internet to socialize,

You don't need to use the internet to socialize.

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

#245

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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 Facebook as idealistic?"

The title refers to a memoir, an autobiographical account of a time period in the author's life.

The word "idealism" refers to the author's idealism, not Facebook's. This is stated in the first sentence of the first chapter.

Idealism routinely causes people to see Facebook as something other than what the facts show.

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

#246

Post by soupfordummies »

Neil44 wrote: post #95

All else aside Zuck was basically a kid when the whole Facebook rocket ship ride took off. Nobody is their best self all day every day. Personally I always thought he came over as kind of an asshole but you have to keep hit pieces like these in the right frame. The shortest accurate answer to what's Zuck like is "I never met him" the rest is just clicks and hot air.

But also... there's been a whooole lot of smoke from his "benefit of the doubt" card burning up for a looong time now.

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

#247

Post by tiagod »

avgd wrote: post #102
poincaredisk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's Facebook - a website that is a large part of life to over 3 billion users. A website that can influence elections in major countries, that sometimes shows fake ads and is responsible for (roughly) millions of frauds caused by them, that incited genocides in African countries. I don't think the stakes are that low.

> website that can influence elections in major countries, I think this sort of power transferred to twitter, with most of the users who haven't left facebook being boomers who keep reposting AI slop over and over and over. The rare times I look at my facebook account, all I see is the older members of my family spamming AI garbage like shrimp jesus, "look at this nice dog sculpture I made out of wood" (that I didn't…

In Portugal and I believe most of the world outside the US, Instagram and FB are king. Tiktok is also popular with the younger generations.

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

#248

Post by soupfordummies »

The irony of Meta trying to stop her from promoting the book is that it's... promoting her book. Any press is good press etc.

This book prob wouldn't have even blipped my radar were it not for all of these stories about how they're trying to stop it.

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

#249

Post by frereubu »

soraminazuki wrote: post #236
frereubu wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idealism is the current corporate story - "enabling communication" etc. - but you're right that there was no idealism to start with. Zuckerberg set up The Facebook so undergrads at Harvard could rate how hot girls were, scraping their images from unprotected university servers. This is a great podcast centred around the film about it - The Social Network - but it delves really interestingly into the story and mot…

This is the first time I heard about anyone buying into any sort of "idealism" of Facebook. Isn't Zuckerberg famous for calling Facebook users "dumb f***s" back in the early days for willingly handing over all sorts of information? https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

I wasn't saying anyone bought into it, just that it's the story Facebook now tells about itself.

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

#250

Post by alex1138 »

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…

Yeah but also, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719

So not only is Facebook historically engaging in creepy contact scraping, but when they finally do get the world connected (for various definitions) they don't even do a good job with that

The strong possibility Zuckerberg just doesn't care about people

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