Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

sfgate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 368 posts

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#61

Post by spoonjim »

kelnos wrote: post #13
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?! Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever e…

I agree for something like a McDonalds employee or even entry level software engineer but this is a senior managerial role at Facebook. Nobody needs to do this job. Unless your spending is out of control you do not need this income. So if it comes with unreasonable demands, I don’t really care. There are problems worth caring about and this ain’t one of them.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#62

Post by kubb »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29
jocaal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

Because your opinion is wrong. Problems with social media notwithstanding, just because you don't like the person who's running/ruining/most associated with the brand, doesn't make the product itself bad. Most people don't give two fraks about who Bezos or Musk or Zuckerberg are, and they definitely don't think of them when using products and services from the companies you mentioned.

> just because you don't like the person...

Do we need that person to keep having the product though?

> Most people don't give two fraks...

They sure don't. These products and services are more like a... public good, used by and available to everyone.

But if it's a common good then should it be managed like a dictatorship?

The people using them don't have an equivalent alternative, and the companies have moats on a scale never seen before. Is that an issue?

Zuck is selling his customers wholesale, and squandering the resulting cash on asinine, unthinkably dumb projects like Metaverse. Maybe he should have just stayed with the initial product?

Maybe these public platforms would better serve the people using them without the person running/ruining/most associated with the brand?

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#63

Post by spoonjim »

amval wrote: post #38
raverbashing wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The other way is of an employee who has seen how her boss treats employees, and believes that her position, career, and livelihood would be in jeopardy if she wasn't working even in situations where no one should be expected to be working. Honestly, they need to grow a pair This kind of pressure (might) have worked for me if I was just out of university and such. But with experience you get to learn your boundaries…

Big companies tend to develop cult dynamics. This is not an exaggeration, but a consequence of how humans tend to operate in large amounts. And I'd wager that in the case of Silicon Valley tech companies, this is also something that they embrace and nurture. I don't think this is a controversial take at all, and rather obvious. She was probably not "afraid of being let go" (fired), but had convinced herself that it w…

They tend to have cult dynamics because the people who subscribe to the cult dynamics are the ones who get promoted. If you’re happy to just make a living as a software engineer instead of trying to propel your way up the ladder of the world’s richest companies then you can live very happily and comfortably.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#65

Post by Juliate »

kumarvvr wrote: post #20

We still haven't found out how to use the internet to socialize, without resorting to giving power to a central entity. If there is something out there that can do this, profitably, then we can kiss these mega social giants good bye. I heard about the Blue Sky protocol, but it still feels primitive.

_Centralized platforms_ socialising happened around 2004, Facebook being one big survivor of that time. Because then, centralising stuff to provide a massive service proved more efficient (money wise: resources, investment, control, ads).

But socialising on the internet? There were plenty of options before, around and after then. Only, they didn't get the same support, convergence and effort since then. Because most people trusted the centralized services would opt to do the right things eventually. Ha. Fools were we.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#66

Post by goodpoint »

jocaal wrote: post #15
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

Boycotts might work occasionally but they are often not enough.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#68

Post by zelphirkalt »

kelnos wrote: post #13
isoprophlex wrote: post #7

Good to have more people expose the greedy, dictatorial, detrimental shitshow that is single individuals having an outsized control over important technology. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Noone should be as big as Zuck, Musk, Altman, Bezos... I had one moment of eyebrow-raising while reading the article. On the risk of blaming someone who was mind controlled into caring too much about ultimately unimportant, s…

> My thinking is... can you put this 100% on Sandberg? I mean, I get that the culture is bad, but there's two in this game. Maybe... turn off your phone for a day when you're giving birth?! Sure, but you can look at this in one of two ways. One is the way you seem to be angling for, where we have an employee who is so disturbingly eager to please that she continues to do work at absurd times when no one should ever e…

In an alternative version of reality, she would be so distracted, that she failed to give birth and the child died as a consequence of her being completely absorbed in a toxic work culture. That alternative version of reality would be completely believable, and probably many would not be more surprised than now reading this news. This tells us all we need to know about FB.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#69

Post by cjfd »

max_ wrote: post #24
kelnos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten. Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.

It is definitely not healthy. But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism. I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it. Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators. What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

One question is why communism is a problem. It is a problem because it is a totalitarian regime. I.e., a non-democratic government. I am not sure limiting peoples wealth is the actual problem with communism.

Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.

'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.

Re: Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

#70

Post by [deleted] »

HenryBemis wrote: post #51
linotype wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to delete your account though. They may still track you, but you’re not feeding the attention machine.

It won't 'protect' you. They still track you and have a shadow account for you, and sell the data. FB is a cancer that won't go away until we/you do. You can protect yourself by blocking all 'social media buttons' (as LI or Pinterest do the same), and for FB block every domain they use and their range of IPs. But there are so many trackers that will (eventually) get the 'job' done, so you either do 'more' (replace ho…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN