Statement from Mark Zuckerberg • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#521

Post by popcube » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:15 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #511

rhaksw wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.

I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. That's probably true but not at Facebook's scale. If the employees are willing to accept the argument "We could have increased profit but chose not to in the interests of users.", because everyone's bonuses and stock value is based on profit, you'd need to hire a lot of people who are happy to trade some amount of personal gain for user we…

if they can do this, let everyone trust they do this, rheir company will beyond all organizations in human history. you can let them take care your kids!

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#522

Post by atoav » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:19 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #138

jedberg wrote: post #68

I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point. But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem. The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart…

> they might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more.

Isn't it just about that in the end? I think being good or not is about whether you give yourself the room to do the right thing even when other pressures exist – because they always exist.

Being good can be hard, because sometimes it means you have to abandon your usual priorities and stand up to the consequences which will emerge from that decision.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#523

Post by saiya-jin » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:23 AM UTC

pmp11pmp wrote: post #501

OpieCunningham wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice. > I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. > Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under the condition that you weren't allowed to burn fewer fossil fuels. There is one person who controls all the constraints: Zuckerberg. He even went so far as to enforce that through his stock classifications. It’s entirely understandable and acceptable to have empa…

Zuckerberg is simply over his head and I think he knows it(I certainly wouldn't want to be in his shoes). I don't think he's evil I think he was enamored of this toy he built, he pushed it in very logical "business" directions, and now it's been adopted by so many people and its so big, its business model is having real world impact where I'm sure he'd prefer, from an intellectual perspective, that it acted totally p…

I think you are overly generous to him. He has extremely powerful tools at his hand, and he properly owns them and has absolute power over them.

But due to whatever reasons (ego, greed of seeing his net worth rising and fear of losing some of it etc.) he won't take morally right step that would harm FB's financials in any way.

On top of that, let's be clear - the mission of FB never was some altruistic connecting the world, in contrary - it was all that juicy private data on each of us while we are connecting and interacting, quietly building a shadow profile for every single human being. There is no moral high ground there no matter how much mental gymnastics you try. If FB would somehow leak those data publicly, the company would go bust very quickly.

In more than 1 way, I struggle to understand these whistleblowers - they get hired for tons of money into company with clearly amoral (or at very best dubious) mission and then they are surprised when it actually is... Similar case would be going to investment or private banking and then being surprised how business is set up and how decision makers in it behave

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#524

Post by surfingdino » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:24 AM UTC

spoonjim wrote: post #278

wpietri wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point. But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem. The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart…

This is a place where the founder-CEO-demigod like Zuck should able to make better decisions than a professional team like Twitter. The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government. With all the fawning praise of him as a kid I don’t think Zuck envisioned that one day both Democrats and Republicans would be united in their desire to…

Zuck started Facebook as Facemash, a site to judge attractiveness of students by other students. It was a creepy site then and has remained to this day. Sorry, but companies to take after their founders, because the founders set an example of what is OK, how to behave, what their values are, etc. While he may not be responsible for all of the actions of his employees, the buck stops with him.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#525

Post by inciampati » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #428

jedberg wrote: post #68

I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…

Another "statement", one not intended for the public https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-c... (Note: "Connecting people" here does not mean providing communications services, it means using behind-the-scenes, unconsented, and sometimes deceptive tactics to figure out whether and how people are connected to each other IRL.) Andrew Bosworth June 18, 2016 The Ugly We talk about the good and the ba…

The hard irony is that Facebook is just another mechanism to fragment people. It is no different than these other "borders, languages, and increasingly by different products".

It seems that the author is operating under the assumption that if everyone is inside of their product, the world won't be fragmented anymore. People will be connected.

Yes. They will be connected. To the product.

We can do better than this dreary future. It is possible to connect people as peers, without the exploiting hands of intermediaries like the executive who wrote this statement.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#526

Post by Dracophoenix » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:28 AM UTC

ikr678 wrote: post #462

Dracophoenix wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press. Could this just be an issue of too many problems to ca…

Depends if not causing harm to users was an executive KPI or not.

How would "harming users" be defined for an executive KPI?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#527

Post by MakersF » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:33 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #511

rhaksw wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.

I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. That's probably true but not at Facebook's scale. If the employees are willing to accept the argument "We could have increased profit but chose not to in the interests of users.", because everyone's bonuses and stock value is based on profit, you'd need to hire a lot of people who are happy to trade some amount of personal gain for user we…

This comment consider employees (people) as if they were algorithms to maximize personal revenue.

That is not necessarily true. If FB where a place where people could feel proud of the good it does, a lot would be ok taking a pay cut.

Sure, maybe the ones that care the most about compensation wouldn't join, but that might be ok.

I worked previously for a for-profit company which was devolving a massive amount of their profits to charity. It was something I was proud of, and a part of my evaluation of how much I liked working there.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#528

Post by retSava » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:33 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #342

skizm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you. Facebook brings way more good to the world than bad. And the bad it brings is just amplification of what already exists. And with the Internet that amplification will happen with or without facebook. Also the fact that much of the research / “leaks” are showing most of the issues are only happening in the US is a sort of a glaring hole in most of the arguments being made against FB. The US is just borke…

Most people completely have their head in the sand about how utterly awful the average person is. A massive chunk of what people complain about is simply attributable to the fact that people are monsters, and that global connectivity means we can now all talk to each other without distribution being tightly bottlenecked and controlled (eg publishers, broadcasters, radio, etc). There's little that Facebook is accused…

Absolutely. But one of the things Facebook does, is to favor showing those bad things to others because it drives engagements. The feed is just a steady stream of the same low-effort, high-emotion stuff.

The problems with Facebook are not (all) unique to Facebook, and they are not single-faceted. Another problem is that they do their hardest and ugliest to inject themselves everywhere they can, to scoop up emotions and events to get a fuller view of people, so they can sell ads.

I quit Facebook 2012, block anything fb in my browsers, don't use their messenger etc. I just hope this'll work when my daughter is old enough to want a phone too.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#529

Post by xg15 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #68

I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…

There is a German saying: "Der Fisch stinkt von Kopf her". 90% of all employees may very well have the best intentions, but this doesn't mean anything if the decision makers have not.

A company is not a democracy.

Indeed, we have probably just seen one of the (former) employees with good intentions struggle to stay true to them.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#530

Post by xg15 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 7:43 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #432

wpietri wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forest from the trees. Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their a…

What does breaking up a company actually do for the consumer? I don't think telecoms are any better for the consumer decades after we broke Bell. There is strong incentive to just form a cartel like telecoms today rather than a competitive environment that is beneficial for the consumer.

> a competitive environment that is beneficial for the consumer.

You mean a competitive environment like this one? https://www.beingguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/top-mes...