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The Lost Chapter

aarongreenspan.com

61–70 of 246 posts

Re: The Lost Chapter

#61
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first person who comes along and hits the web industry jackpot at an unprecedented level who is also not a stereotype antisocial nerd douchebag* is going to thoroughly debunk all theories that correlate this sort of character to financial success without any evidence of causation. * The degree to which sheer luck and network effects are factors in this particular sector makes this plausible.

Um Jack Dorsey?

Jack who?

Re: The Lost Chapter

#62
post #15

A very large chunk of his articles are negative http://www.aarongreenspan.com/writing/index.html Not saying they aren't all true, I'm sure they are. Why focus on the negativity? Recognize it and move beyond.

[deleted]

Re: The Lost Chapter

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old was he when he made that comment? We all do/say dumb things when we are young...

he hasn't gotten much nicer with age, he just got a bit more careful on what he says in public.

He sure smiles a lot though!

Re: The Lost Chapter

#66

"Perhaps the lesson here is that competing with and using your 'friends' in serial fashion until you totally and completely ravage each relationship is key to achieving financial success—but then it's certainly no way to define friendship." That's certainly not the lesson. In fact what's always made me believe these sort of attacks against Zuckerberg's character is the fact that you don't see this happen with really…

Larry and Sergey are different from other star founders who've been accused of evil (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg) in that they were older so maybe more mature and also relatively less entrepreneurial- their goal was academia, unlike all the young dropouts. Maybe many extremely entrepreneurial people don't respect the law. In Zuckerberg's case it does seem like he doesn't care about patents at all whereas Aaron is still mad about the IP and hates that Zuckerberg ignored the rules (re: patents, Facemash, dropping out, and everything else) and got rewarded for it.

Reading the logs I don't get the sense Zuckerberg is being dishonest or that he even considers Aaron to be a friend. The main conflict seems to be the accusation that Zuckerberg stole ideas, which is a big question for software in general: ideas want to spread so the concept of IP is arguably against the nature of ideas. At the same time, we want people to be able to get rich off a great idea even if they don't implement it successfully. This question re: IP and copyrights is something we're still resolving as a society. Until it gets resolved, if ever, lots of people are going to have lots of unfair things happen to them and it's understandable to be mad about that.

But that's what life is: unfair. Just like we can't go through life feeling guilty about how lucky we are to have survived infancy unlike some absurd percentage of humans in poor countries, we can't constantly hate on other people who are even luckier than we are re: how they don't deserve their success. No one deserves anything. Life is unfair.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#67
post #27

Logline: Zuckerberg mistreats Aaron Greenspan, is therefore greatest con of all time.

Well put. While he may be simply "telling his side of the story", Aaron Greenspan comes off in his own writing as a sanctimonious, sour-grapes-y, whinger.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#68
post #7

People get screwed over all the time. Getting screwed over by Zuckerberg, well, that's an elite club, but time to move on with your life. If you keep it only as a good story for the grand kids maybe it won't eat up the rest of your potential.

He got screwed by Google, Inc. as well so lightening does strike twice http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/why-i-sued-goo...

Re: The Lost Chapter

#69
post #60

The accumulated evidence of Zuckerberg's poor character was already overwhelming. For me, all it took was the infamous "dumb fucks" quote to make me decide to never use Facebook. That alone disqualifies someone to be a responsible custodian of my privacy. This article's evidence isn't as significant as other established facts like Zuckerberg's invasion of other people's email accounts, but it is consistent with every…

How much do you know about the CEO of Walmart? Do you trust him or her with all your personal shopping history? What about your apartment's building manager? Do you trust him or her to not have hidden cameras in your apartment? How much do you trust the head of state of your country? Do you trust him or her with the almost limitless amount of your personal information that may have been collected?

False equivalency. All over false equivalency.

Walmart isn't a service. Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does. Heck millions of Virgin Mobile accounts have been compromised. But the potential damage isn't even in the same order of magnitude of something (hypothetically) going foul at FB, either owing to deliberate policy or accidentally.

Same with JetBlue with passenger data some years ago. Not same order. Not same potential damage.

Re: The Lost Chapter

#70
I'm not going to publicly speculate on either party's moral character. But I did skim the transcripts, and I noticed one curious fact:

Zuckerberg starts and ends most of the conversations.

To clarify: I'm not sure precisely why I find it interesting, it was just one of those phenomena that raised an eyebrow, and passed my "don't publicly engage in debates about people's character whom I haven't personally met"-test. (To be fair I do make practical judgments based on moral reputation when deciding whether or not to enter relationships with others.)

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