Live data from Hacker News

Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

economist.com

271–280 of 609 posts

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#271
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.

Exactly - and FB itself knows that there is no wave of exits following a scandal. They learned that. They can have a conversation with one group and know the other group / the business is not really touched by any of this.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would also suggest as someone on the other end is that they have been very aggressive trying to get people during the pandemic. The recruiter name changes every few months but you get multiple calls and so on, moreso than others I've been engaged with.

Seeing exactly the same...recruiter after recruiter from FB go through the same dance. I don't know why they keep doing this given I never respond.

I told the recruiter at the start of the pandemic in no uncertain terms that I would never work for facebook or any company owned by them, and to not contact me again. I haven't received another request since.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#273
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been so long since a company reached Facebook's heights and fell that a whole generation doesn't know what it looks like. AOL was the Facebook of its time: a joke to system admins, a default ban on small game servers and IRC channels. Meanwhile, most people had no idea anyone had a problem with AOL. Like with Facebook, there were people reporting on its follies like Observers.net[0], but it mostly went unremarke…

Everyone keeps leaving Instagram out of the discussion. I wonder why?

people are over facebook and instagram is flagging also. tick tock isn’t the end either. who’s next?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced. I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO becam…

Standard Oil => SO => Esso. Mind blown! I had no idea.

Yep, and Esso + Humble became Exxon. Other parts turned into Mobil, Amoco, Marathon, Unocal and Texaco...

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced. I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO becam…

I want to see court-mandated open source and federation. Doubt it'd ever happen though...

What other private property are you in favor of taking from others?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#276

The biggest component missing from Silicon Valley's discussion of Facebook is its pathological lying. They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and the EU [2]. They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3]. (These just off the top of my head.) The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down. That is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik Tok. That is what its surrogates miss…

I'm on the outside looking in, (and this might be an unpopular opinion in this crowd) but that's the reputation of tech in Silicon Valley, no? The mentality is often "we'll be too small to prosecute until we're too big". That's how you end up with these seemingly superlegal entities like Uber, Google, hell even Crunchyroll. Theranos was the peak example of how tech companies are encouraged to misrepresent fact to bot…

Not saying you're right it wrong, bit Theranos seems like a counter example to what you are arguing.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#277
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.

Well, there are others of "us" that realize Facebook is a company just like any other company. Switching from Facebook to X or Y doesn't realy make any difference. And if you do think it makes a difference, you are very naive.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#278

This whole circus is about as contrived as it gets, complete with the "think of the children" gimmick. The timing, the theatrics, the manufactured celebrity of a middle manager at Facebook who is doing the "right" kind of whistleblowing that the establishment likes. Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new. This is about raw power to censor.

This borders on conspiratorial. What "establishment" are you talking about? You might as well have said boogey man. I'm guessing you mean Democrats, since Republicans have greatly benefited from the distribution of propaganda and misinformation that social media like Facebook enables. These are the same Democrats who barely have a majority in Congress. They're struggling to pass legislation because the moment they lose even a single senator, they don't have the votes. The Republicans, who favor no intervention, are as much "establishment" as those who want to reign in FB and still hold a lot of power.

> Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new.

I don't get this. Nothing to see here because other companies are also bad? Someone who worked at the company leaked documents showing that Facebook's own research shows they are causing harm and we should do nothing because this isn't new? I don't understand this logic.

> This is about raw power to censor.

The implication here is that our society's free speech is largely dependent on Facebook. Free speech existed before social media, why is it that now it can't exist without it? Now the health of our democracy is linked to what Facebook, which is controlled by a single person, decides to do on the platform. That seems pretty unhealthy and something worth correcting. Government intervention has its downsides, but what else do you suggest?

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still have a FB account [...] I have a hard time imagining how anyone could get sucked into it. I drink a glass of beer several times a week, and can't imagine how anyone could become addicted to alcohol. Very sadly, the world does not feel at all constrained by my imagination.

Fair enough, the second half of my comment didn’t really follow from the first. But I think my point stands about the relative attention paid to FB compared to other platforms. I don’t get it.

> Maybe because it's the largest [...]

This. Same way that Apple gets the headlines when it's learned that workers at some electronics factory are being horribly mistreated.

(Well...maybe that's stretching it. I've heard several times that, for quite a few people, FB basically is the web.)

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced. I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO becam…

Standard Oil => SO => Esso. Mind blown! I had no idea.

(off to buy domain names efbe.com, effbee.com, ...)
Post reply on HN