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Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#381

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

mindgam3 wrote: post #61

I've known Chris Cox since freshman year of college and he was an informal advisor to my first startup. The NYT article referenced in hashberry's earlier comment includes a key quote: “For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: Social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral,” Mr. Cox said in a note to employees on Thursday. “As its builders…

My guess is that these are all unintended consequences of very big systems. If you have so many actors in your playground as Facebook, then it just becomes impossible to foresee the results of your actions, and how people will use the platform.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#382

Post by [deleted] »

zaarn wrote: post #368
lmm wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my mind the killer is event organisation. Put it this way: Meetup is apparently a viable business while charging money for a less-good version of something Facebook offers for free-at-point-of-use. No-one else really competes in that space at all (group chats aren't suitable because people who can't make a given event end up being spammed with all the details of it anyway, while people who join late miss out on de…

Where I live, everyone uses either email, whatsapp or public spaces to advertise and organize meetups, from my sister I know that most parties are orgnaized over WA or Instagram, nobody likes using FB for it.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#383

Post by Spooky23 »

manigandham wrote: post #296
Spooky23 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humanity doesn’t need to adapt to Facebook. Imagine if you said this about cars in 1919... we could put up traffic lights or evolve to leap out of the way of cars. If Facebook needs to enjoy an AT&T style monopoly on connecting people, they need to submit to being under a regulatory thumb.

As I just said, you're conflating the social network with Facebook the company. Instant feed-based communications with varying levels of follower/friendship levels is a new technology provided by many organizations. Some are massive monopolies and others are indie apps, it doesn't matter but the tech is not going away so yes, we the people will need to learn how to deal with it.

No, I’m not. Facebook’s scale and business practices is the problem, not the social graph or feed. Facebook sought to make friction re: sharing and signaling as low as possible. The result is obvious. But that outcome is not inevitable or fundamental to the technology, it’s a conscious engineering decision made by the firm.

Unrestricted broadcast access was understood as a problem with radio 100 years ago. Society controlled that with a regulatory stick and will likely do so again.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#384

Post by Spooky23 »

resters wrote: post #318
Spooky23 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government has unlimited resources. If they want to use Facebook as a propaganda platform, they would do so, and Facebook would happily accept their cash. The Russian campaign that you’re dismissive of is consistent with the heritage of Russian intelligence services. Lenin’s newspaper was called “Iskra” (spark) in the context of “from a spark a fire will flare up.” The army of trolls is there to foment dissent…

> Facebook would happily accept their cash It's not so simple, because not all employees would go along with it. It's possible that Zuck is stalling so he can figure out how to deliver what he's being asked for without creating too much turmoil. > consistent with the heritage of Russian intelligence services And also consistent with US intelligence services and a historic tit for tat. Russia's alleged $150K spend is…

What Facebook employees are going to stop various entities from buying ads, promoting posts and seeding various corners of the platform with propaganda memes?

If you don’t cross the line and violate the community standards the answer is nobody.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#385

Post by psoy »

tedivm wrote: post #225
jedberg wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Tobacco has no benefits to society except possibly a dopamine hit for the user. Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school. And I know that it's only because of Facebook, because Facebook didn't exist for the first 10 years after I graduated, and most of my friends didn't get on it until about 15 year…

I hear this quite a lot from the people who have worked at "damaging" companies (facebook, reddit, twitter, uber) but I still have to wonder if the personal benefits these platforms bring are really worth the societal cost, and if people are just using the idea that they can "change things from inside" as a justification for taking money to damage the world. Don't get me wrong, I think that communication is great. It…

What kind of company do you work for?

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#386

Post by leetcrew »

Jach wrote: post #144
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flip it around. If you are an employee partly compensated in stock, is it fair for a multi-billionaire who was one of your former bosses to flippantly trash talk the company in public after he cashes out, potentially damaging the value of your stock...? Wouldn't you want your employer to put some controls into place to prevent that kind of pointless harm to you? You can still talk about literally anything else if you…

> You can still talk about literally anything else if you sign a non-disparagement clause or an NDA. Why does this matter? It reminds me of the joke about how in America we value free speech so much that we can badmouth our leaders in public, but so what, in Soviet Russia they can badmouth the American leaders in public too. The question of how free your speech is, is determined by what you can't say, or can't get aw…

think about it another way: it's blackmail against your employer that is actually initiated by the employer itself. you don't even have to make any threats and it's not illegal!

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#387

Post by renholder »

jancsika wrote: post #196
renholder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ad dollars come from knowing you, not concealing you. Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests... Imagine what people would share between themselves if it wasn't "public for the world to see". Imagine how many more data points that would produce for targeted advertisements on the Facebook platform, alone. Edit: Including necessary referenc…

> Advertising dollars are far more lucrative if you think you can trust where you're sharing your deepest, darkests... You mean like a Google search? If you don't mean a Google search, I'm not sure what you could mean. What could possibly be more intimate than a person's lifelong history of general queries in their pursuit of knowledge and personal identity? Oftentimes those queries are even natural language sentence…

>If you don't mean a Google search, I'm not sure what you could mean.

If you're considering buying a motorcycle and have a friend (or a group of friends) that own(s) a motorcylce, are you more likely to ask that friend (or that group) the pros/cons of owning a motorcycle and for their recommendations or are you far more likely to use "nature language sentences" in Google to illicit that information (e.g.: "I'm thinking of buying a motorcycle")?

I'm going to posit that the former occurs far more frequently than the latter and that this is the potential "untapped market" for targeted advertising that a "private social network" would be after.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#388

Post by smokeyj »

aylmao wrote: post #350
smileysteve wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school. Ask a reluctant smoker why they won't quit, beyond the addiction it's 1. Social. People talk during smoke breaks. They form bonds over smoke breaks. A 5 minute smoke break per hour means you spend 40 minutes around a friend, co worker, in relative private. It's even a…

Of all the people who smoke never once have I heard the social argument as you describe it. I'm not trying to comment on the subject of the analogy, but just on the fact that I trying to apply the analogy to this space is a bit of a stretch. I've heard the argument of "I don't care what it does to me", or "I'm gonna die anyway, what gives if I shed a few years at the end", but never "I won't be able to connect to oth…

"I smoke when I drink" - you never heard that? Social smoking is absolutely a thing.

Facebook is a cancer and executives will jump ship while they can to claim ignorance.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#389

Post by smileysteve »

aylmao wrote: post #350
smileysteve wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school. Ask a reluctant smoker why they won't quit, beyond the addiction it's 1. Social. People talk during smoke breaks. They form bonds over smoke breaks. A 5 minute smoke break per hour means you spend 40 minutes around a friend, co worker, in relative private. It's even a…

Of all the people who smoke never once have I heard the social argument as you describe it. I'm not trying to comment on the subject of the analogy, but just on the fact that I trying to apply the analogy to this space is a bit of a stretch. I've heard the argument of "I don't care what it does to me", or "I'm gonna die anyway, what gives if I shed a few years at the end", but never "I won't be able to connect to oth…

None of the statements you shared are reasons to smoke, they are things people tell people when people tell them that smoking is harmful.

Re: Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox

#390

Post by d35007 »

chrischen wrote: post #334
passn wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a good thing for the world was a lie" - That is such a broad generalization. In the developing world where I live Facebook gives me the opportunity to maintain contact with my family who live on the other side of the world, as I walk the streets of São Paulo, for free. There are hundreds of millions of others like me who keep in contact with their family because of Facebook (and th…

Actually this was possible already, and most of Facebook's primary features existed before Facebook. Facebook can really be described as the time wasting, addiction-inducing, feature-sets on top of standard social communication features, driven by their main goal of delivering and monetizing ads. Helping you communicate with your friends and family? That's just an ad vector. Recently my friend group switched over to…

> this was possible already, and most of Facebook's primary features existed before Facebook.

I constantly tell people that my favorite social networking platform is email. I get laughed at a lot.

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