Delete your social media now
Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
461–470 of 609 posts
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#462[deleted]
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#463Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s fairly standard “brand-building.” Ever notice how, when a new movie or album is about to drop, you start seeing tabloid stories, featuring the stars? On the one hand, it can be argued that “people are interested, because of the movie.” Except the stories usually start long before any “official” advertisements appear. It’s about “building buzz,” and the American advertising industry (they refer to themselves as…
> is the best in the world, for this kind of thing. I don't mean to be rude here, but how do you know? How could you even know? Did they tell you they're the best, by any chance?
Not rude, but I'd be interested in knowing who's better at it.
I'm not a fan of the industry. Recognizing that someone is good at something, is not the same as approving.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future. AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation. And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because i…
Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Yeah. Network effect. Arguably nothing on Earth has ever had such a powerful network effect as Facebook. I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own. But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirel…
>But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.
I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email / phone number, my number is X, as I would like to maintain contact."
Or does FB not allow you to do that?
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
A simple search for "hunter biden laptop" on Facebook immediately kicks up three news articles, dozens of site posts, and (in the bubble I can see from my own friends list) several dozen posts on the topic from the point of view that the laptop was real. If this is Democratic censorship in action, it's incredibly bad at its goals.
It was censored on all tech platforms at once when the story broke so the information wouldn't hit mainstream weeks ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Yes eventually they had to allow it because it was blatant censorship, but the damage is done.
You are correct, so I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. Facebook explicitly suppressed the story.
> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
-- Andy Stone, Facebook Policy Communications Director
https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000
Coincidentally enough, if you check Andy Stone's LinkedIn you will see that before he started working at Facebook he worked for various organizations associated with the Democratic party.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every large corporation "lies". But there are a number of mechanisms. First, large corporation are large, which means its impossible to know whats happening everywhere. This means you are reliant on your underlings to report up to you. At each stage there will be entropy, noise and distortion. Second there is PR, their job is to massage, deflect and sway. Thirdly there is knowingly mislead in public. The problem we h…
Every company "lies" but Facebook lies. What OP cited had nothing to do with PR or public statements. They are all regulatory representations that were later found to be false. That's different. It's pretty rare that companies make known material misstatements to regulators. Instead, they figure out what they want to do and they do make the least revealing statement that isn't a lie. You mentioned that we should leve…
> They are all regulatory representations that were later found to be false.
Just look at finance, the entire market is based on telling mistruths to regulators.
Apple are currently piling industrial amounts of bullshit to a number of regulators. The irish, dutch and british tax authorities are constantly being fed lies about where "sales" happen.
Google have lied to both austrialian and french regulators.
The reason I brought up apple is because they are doing to to defuse the fact that they are alone amongst FAANG for enabling child abuse.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#467Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million. "All of humanity" a silly denominator. There are fewer than 30 million software engineers in the world [1], so at 0.1% we're talking about 30,000 people worldwide. That's... not a lot of people. At all. There are waaaaaay more than 30K "we'll pay anything for the best" SWE positions in the world. > Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other cou…
Outsourcing option pre-coursera/edx/YouTube/slack/remote-infrastructure is vastly different from post-x An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool. Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
> Outsourcing option pre-coursera/edx/YouTube
The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs. Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are noise.
> slack/remote-infrastructure
Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing existed during the wave in the early 2010s.
We've been through this rodeo before.
In college I was warned to major in Accounting instead of CS because all the programming jobs would be outsourced. Today, I make north of $600K and all of the entry level positions at the Big 4 ask for some programming knowledge, or at the very least strong SQL/Excel skills.
Again, I've lived through some of these waves. IBM et al. tried this twice and lost both times.
> An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
I'm... not even going to engage with this.
> Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
I don't really know where this moral panic about woke culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've experienced in the workplace. I don't doubt that there are microclimates within FAANGS where this is a problem, but I've never seen it and at this point have to assume it's not as pervasive as the panicked folks seem to think.
In meatspace, I've had a number of friends who've complained about cancel culture/wokeness. Mostly in our small group at church. TBH, if I had to guess based on my interactions with those folks at church, all of them are struggling in their careers because they are abrasive, argumentative, and have a tendency to steamroll conversations. That lack of social graces is the sort of thing people put up with in church/friend groups but have less patience for at work (particularly in non-executive roles).
I don't doubt that cancelling is a thing, but my general anecdotal experience has been that most people complaining about it are wrong about the motivation for their firing/non-promotion. For prideful people, it's often easier to believe the world hates Christians or Conservatives than to own up to the fact that people just don't like working with or especially under abrasive personalities.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd hesitate to generalize AOL's fall into Facebook's future. AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation. And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because i…
One possibility is that a Facebook account becomes something that most people have but they seldom use, like a LinkedIn account. The news feed could get less interesting, resulting in fewer visits.
I think this is already the case and is why FB doesn’t want to get rid of the offending content, for many users this is the only thing still keeping them engaged. Turn that off and it’s just a stream of advertising, memes, and dinner pics.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#469Forget the negative reputation for a moment.
I just logged into Facebook after a few months not doing so, because someone told me via third party to contact them, and Facebook was the only method available of the ones we both have.
About half the entries on my Facebook feed are ads of one kind or another!
There are some posts from people I know, but because the ads are more prominent, larger, in some ways more interesting, posts from people I know are somehow harder to see while scrolling through the feed.
Why would I want to log in, just to view an endless scroll of ads? What's Facebook's business model these days? Surely people will have had enough of watching an ad stream at some point, and then stop using it?
I keep my account to remain able to communicate with people I know from my past lives, and I do like seeing what people want to share occasionally. These are "weak bonds" but I enjoy them anyway. There's also a couple of memorial pages for people I love who passed away some years ago, that are not anywhere else. But that means I login about once every few months, or when I find out that I should for a specific reason.
The feed page just isn't interesting, so I don't see myself logging in again for another few months. I remember the Facebook feed as being more people focused, more about personal relationships, years ago. Far fewer ads.
Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
#470Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be more than happy if facebook disappeared. They are a disaster, no doubt. That's not what's going to happen though. Facebook will get exactly what they keep saying they want: regulation and oversight. Facebook will be just as entrenched as ever and will protect the Official Copy of Reality as defined by the ruling class. They are already doing that to some degree and just want it to be codified. My concern is fo…
Is oversight of and transparency into recommendation algorithms, to make sure they don't overprioritize vitriol and sow division, really creating an "Official Copy of Reality"? At this point I'd say our reality is actively being fractured by the effects of these platforms. The solutions suggested by Haugen, whose disclosure is driving this broader conversation we're having, are related to fundamental algorithmic desi…
If it bleeds, it leads. The corporate media has been the primary sower of division and spreads plenty of misinformation itself.
Polarization and vitriol precedes these platforms. Facebook, twitter, reddit, they all make it worse, I agree with that. And I would be in favor of requiring them to make their algorithms public at the very least.
But we must not give an even more centralized authority power over what's considered `harmful` or `misinformation`. You have to imagine this tool in the hands of your enemy because at some point it will be.