Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#561

Post by CPLNTN » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 7:18 AM UTC

winternett wrote: post #391

shoto_io wrote: 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.

People will eventually abandon FB and WA if you ask me, the accelerant to that is their friends leaving and no longer logging in over time, and also the authentication eco-system slowly disconnecting from the platform. Like Friendster, ClubHouse, and MySpace, there is a life cycle for every app. All the redisign and rebranding can't cure a good idea that has festered into a bad idea. Facebook's tenure has been long i…

> All the redisign and rebranding can't cure a good idea that has festered into a bad idea.

I think you are speaking from a soft eng perspective. Most people don't actually care about the product features / reputation. It's a social media and that means that the only thing that matter is that other people are on it.

No service currently has the critical mass of user to outshine the FB group, and i think this will be the case for a long time.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#562

Post by CPLNTN » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

sorokod wrote: post #151

gkilmain wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 40 something friend who started working there a few years a go. He has a family. He mostly went for stability, good pay, good benefits, predictable long term outlook. Not working insane hours. He loves it. Actually said he feels valued as an engineer.

Morally he is ok? No issues looking at the mirror?

I work in a country where engineers are paid like factory workers.. if FB offered me a job i would be happy to take it even they sold unapproved drugs.

Morally questioning a company with that kind of salary and benefits requires a position of incredible privilege.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#563

Post by MiddleEndian » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 7:34 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #514

MiddleEndian wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram and anything else aimed at talking to the public) mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or follow celebrity gossip. On Facebook, I talk to and organize events with my friends and family. My conversations are continuous across devices, and they are not mobile-first like texting or whatsapp or snapchat or some of the new…

To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram and anything else aimed at talking to the public) mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or follow celebrity gossip. I enjoy Twitter a lot and my feed is 0% randos and celebrities. It's about 50% friends I know personally and 50%... well, not "celebrities" but like... local personalities, independent musicians, leaders…

I guess I just don't have a particular desire for that to be integrated into the same system I use to talk to my friends. To me FB is just a replacement for AIM with some conveniences like being able to look people up by name. If I want aggregated tech news I just come here, if I want to know what someone specific like Stallman is up to, I'll go to his site or send him an email.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#564

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 7:48 AM UTC

worthless-trash wrote: post #532

oarabbus_ wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp This doesn't seem accurate, do you have evidence to back up this claim? Instagram had 30 million users and no revenue upon acquisition. Facebook had over a billion, and billions in revenues.

I believe this is based on the writers perception, not reality. I can argue that my friends now use all use email, eclipsing facebook, whatsapp and instagram, better buy those stocks in SMTP. ;)

Perception, yes: https://stratechery.com/2020/social-networking-2-0/

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#565

Post by dr_dshiv » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 8:00 AM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #478

JohnBooty wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LJ was "peak internet" for me. I had a smallish network of friends on there and we read and commented on each others' stuff. You could be as personal or as detached and anonymous as you wanted. You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself. Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it w…

Livejournal, to me, was a fusion of three things: a simple HTML editor (aka posts) + a time-sorted view and access controls + discoverability through your network. The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested /…

Why can’t we have this on Facebook?

What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#566

Post by MertsA » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:11 AM UTC

NineStarPoint wrote: post #189

TeaDrunk wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH A range of ages is demographic diversity. No idea why it's forgotten about sometimes.

I suspect there isn't an even subconscious effort to exclude people of age, but that it's a side effect of the FAANG interview process. People who have been in the industry for decades don't care to learn to do leetcode interviews when they can get paid perfectly well somewhere either based on connections, or by going through interviews more centered around job experience. That said, I doubt a person making 60k somew…

>That said, I doubt a person making 60k somewhere would have made it in to a FAANG at any point.

Well you're dead wrong about that.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#567

Post by ignoramous » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:21 AM UTC

oarabbus_ wrote: post #545

ethbr0 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growth, and especially growth in younger demographics, is probably the metric Facebook was looking at.

Right, that's why they bought instagram. But that's a far cry from the claim OP made their "network effect was overwhelmed"

I don't think one can break a scale-free network like that of Facebook by playing the same game as Facebook.

One way to counter a scale-free network is to create adjacent scale-free networks that replaces its competition one part at a time. This is what, I believe, WhatsApp (with messaging) and Instagram (with images) were on the verge of doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network#Immunizatio...

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#568

Post by hirako2000 » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #211

hirako2000 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same taint would apply after working at Google or Apple or even Barclays banks or MIT. Who wants to go through a 3 interview process just to find out that great candidate simply won't sign until the offer is bumped at least 3x

Anecdotal but a fair number of devs I know would be fine with those names, not FB. Facebook is both evil and trivial by reputation. You can do unimportant work that makes the world worse there, so why not compromise and work for some firm that's evil but important, or good but trivial? They'd use the interview for practice and free food. Having said that, I'm not sure you can really tell in the stats that FB needs to…

I was trying to explain the determinant factors.

I say MIT, because of it's tech prestige. I could have said Harvard for lawyers. Would you hire a paralegal coming from a prestiguous school to fill an average position ? Maybe, but for many it's not worth the time trying to catch a fish that won't fit on the boat.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#569

Post by oska » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

dumbfoundded wrote: post #560

oska wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for the part about working for Zuck This would just indicate to me that he's a fraud and all his political posturing is just cheap words compared to the real action of being a part of such a toxic entity. (And no, there's no fighting for reform from within in a place like FB.)

Your statement uses pretty charged language and I don't think you're considering all of the potential scenarios. The first is that giant companies like Facebook are so vastly giant and you have no idea what he does for them. If he was on the React team at Facebook, would that be acceptable to you? Just like governments, giant companies have good and bad parts. The second is that you don't know anyone's situation. Thi…

I appreciate your considered and nuanced reply to my fairly stark comment. My position on Facebook is that it is so awful an entity that it is not moral to work in any position in the company. And I don't buy the excuse of working for an immoral company (if you recognise it as such) because you need the money. But I recognise this is a fairly absolutist position.

Re: Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return

#570

Post by KaiserPro » Fri, Oct 08, 2021, 9:45 AM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #474

KaiserPro wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Just look at finance, the entire market is based on telling mistruths to regulators. There are of course liars in the finance market, but my impression is that most financial companies actually follow regulations quite closely (and happily, their employees often wrote the regs). > Apple are currently piling industrial amounts of bullshit to a number of regulators. The irish, dutch and british tax authorities are co…

> I think we are using language differently. My sense is that Apple is using a legal fiction

That's still lying. its a legal way of avoiding paying tax. We are talking about morals here. Corporations are here to look after themselves. There are no real entities that can bring them to heel, barring public image. Apple are a ruthless company with an excellent and well coordinated legal team. I know because I've been locked out of my own server room because of them.

in the op way up the chain, two of the examples given aren't lying, in the definition that you've written.

https://oversightboard.com/news/3056753157930994-to-treat-us... Thats a clear call to action, but its not "oversight board being lied to"

> google lying to french regulators

"negotiated in bad faith" (read ripped off a bunch of people to avoid having to pay money to digitize people's work)

https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-business-copyri...

> “I am satisfied that Google’s conduct assessed as a whole was misleading or deceptive of, or likely to mislead or deceive, ordinary members within the class identified by the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission], acting reasonably,” Justice Thomas Thawley said in his judgment.

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/australia-google-faces...

Just like facebook, telling porkies about privacy controls.

> I am not sure I understand what you mean here - I would imagine that all of FAANG (aside from netflix probably) provide services used by abusers.

https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/gethelp/...

I'm talking about actively reporting abusers, and abusive content. Apple in 2019 reported 256 cases. 4chan reported 4x that number. 4chan of all places is better at reporting child abuse than apple.

I am not here to defend Facebook. I am here to make sure that all corporations have the same level of scrutiny. This silly "eww facebook stinks, ooooh Apple you're great, even though you've released airtags which are perfect stalking tools" has to stop. I get people respect Apple. but they are on the same spectrum as facebook, an abusive corporation.