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Facebook's Little Red Book

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Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#261

Post by fargle »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #240
yuliyp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street. This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.

The message in the book seems to be that Sun failed out of weakness and it could happen to fb as well if they don’t eat the world.

which is just so narcissistic! the way i see it sun failed because it was a well run sensible company that made good products, that were liked by its customers, and not eat the world.

and that's not what succeeds. so FB will do just fine, if i'm right about that.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#262

Post by tim333 »

ribadeo wrote: post #81

There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid. Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary. I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment. I now feel rather…

Musk did some stuff with EVs and satellites.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#263

Post by PaulHoule »

dartharva wrote: post #247
fragmede wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft stumbled into OpenAI and Google stumbled into Waymo. What's Facebook got?

Was thinking the exact same thing. My hypothesis is that Facebook is behind because just as the Red Book suggests, its overall culture has been to build things primarily for people (freeloaders), and not for enterprises (who are actually the ones paying) like Microsoft (originally) and Google (eventually) do. If you look at Microsoft and Google, a lot of their garage projects are to build products that are useful to…

I worked at a Microsoft shop circa 2007 on ASP.NET/Silverlight systems and we had a subscription to MSDN. This was a pretty good value in terms of the headliner products like SQL Server, Visual Studio, Sharepoint, etc. We were getting discs for everything in MSDN and had a cabinet filled with discs and had an employee whose job it was to catalog it. I was amazed how many discs we had of enterprise software from Microsoft or some company that Microsoft had bought that I'd never heard of we had.

I have mixed feelings about marketing to the enterprise market. On one hand you can build some large and interesting things that deliver a lot of value, particularly in the semi-custom area. For many reasons I can understand the viewpoint of a salesman on commission. On the other hand I was really depressed after I'd talked with about 20 vendors in the "enterprise search" space and found that none of them particularly cared about search relevance and didn't regularly do evaluation work unless they were participating in TREC to gain industry visibility. Sometimes enterprise products have a lack of refinement or even basic quality compared to consumer products.

If I was going to get back into business development I'd do it with a keen understanding that getting the politics right and the software wrong is better than the reverse when it comes to making a living. I think I'd find myself hard to motivate in that situation.

I think Microsoft's end user area where they are the most pathological now is XBOX, Game Pass and all thought. Looking from the outside it looks like Dr. Evil has decided to buy the whole game industry to put it out of business and force people to pick up another hobby.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#264

Post by aristus »

nitwit005 wrote: post #139
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.

When I visited Facebook's HQ years ago, people had modified signs saying "Move fast and break things" by adding a prefix "Don't". I'm sure they knew this was propaganda. The little red book is a very clear reference (just do a search for "little red book" if anyone doesn't recognize the reference).

Mocking the signs at Facebook started literally the day after they appeared suddenly in the 1601 building. "Break fast and eat things", and so on. There was a very fancy print shop on site and we would work up spoofs on the same equipment.

A large percentage of programmers of a certain generation got their start in the graphic design world.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#265

Post by ninth_ant »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #257
ninth_ant wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right about how this decline happened. But encouraging people to share to the widest audience was another aspect where short-term growth of metrics was prioritized over long-term health of the platform. There was a possible future where FB leadership didn’t get worried about/envious of Twitter and push so hard on public sharing. But that type of call was solidly on Zuck and not Sandberg.

To be fair to Sheryl Sandberg, she kept telling them that posting to everyone was a terrible idea but Zuckerberg and Cox didn't listen.

I'm not aware of that personally, but I believe it. The revisionist history trying to paint Zuckerberg as being manipulated here is so just insulting to reality. Zuck deserves the credit for both driving the decisions between both the successes and the failures that arose here.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#266

Post by sirspacey »

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.

There’s a fair case to be made that it delivered on that, the thesis that increasing connectedness diminished violence over time

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#267

Post by exe34 »

concerndc1tizen wrote: post #224
mparnisari wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I get updates from my local community

There is no shared experience of social media - that's what makes it hard to talk about, and keeps everyone in disagreement, because everyone has different perspectives. By design.

I think it's my own fault, I should never have engaged with the numpties. But I do wish the Facebook feed would include more stuff from the cats groups I follow instead of the rage bait.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#268

Post by worik »

fargle wrote: post #260
yuliyp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? That's a weird take. What should they have done? Left the entrance to their headquarters with a Sun Microsystems logo rather than their own? The Sun Microsystems sign continues to be there at the end of Willow Road, just facing toward the campus vs toward the street. This is doing more to honor Sun than any other realistic choice they could have made.

i didn't say there was anything that FB should have done different. it's just sad. it's sad to see a genuinely good company gone and replaced by a slimy one. actually if you include oracle, two slimy ones. who are both inarguably far more successful. it's sad because it's a statement about what our current economy values and what it does not. and to any of you who have the word "engineer" or "scientist" in your job t…

I find it sad, but am also glad, because Zuck and their colleagues came very close to owning Internet communications.

They still rule the roost with that spyware WhatsApp

But at the point they were connecting people as a priority Facebook was an astoundingly good product.

Their greed ruined it (much like Google - it is a characteristic of public corporations in the capitalist system I guess).

If they could have been happy with simply being astoundingly rich they could have built on what they had, developing an ecosystem of software, and developers, to aid in connecting all the people of the world.

Instead they got deep into ad tech. Squeezed every dollar. Ruined it.

Mēh! Better off are we now!

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#269

Post by Willish42 »

incog_nit0 wrote: post #236

As a jaded 40+ year old developer this got me choked up. I remember that optimistic view we all had of technology in our youth. For me the optimism was a little earlier than 2012 so maybe it goes hand in hand with being young and less experienced (jaded?). I agree with some of the other commenters that a corporate structure makes altruistic goals like these impossible. Only Wikipedia and The Internet Archive for me c…

> Perhaps we need a corporate structure between a non-profit and a for-profit

Maybe a co-op (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)? There are also "for-profit" like businesses that are oriented around a different goal than just profits, https://good.store/pages/good-store-about-us comes to mind.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#270

Post by dredmorbius »

sneak wrote: post #232
dredmorbius wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/government/governments/ Also corporations, political parties, propagandists, hucksters, and others. Pathogens co-evolve with their hosts.

There’s only one government that Facebook/Meta really has to obey, and that’s the one that can show up at Zucc’s houses with the CIA. The other ones are mostly optional.

Localised bans are possible. Those threaten not only present userbase and revenue, but open up niches for alternatives favoured by that logal regime to become established.

Weibo would be a prime example of that last dynamic, in China.

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