Facebook's Little Red Book • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#81

Post by ribadeo » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:17 PM UTC

There are STILL people drinking the techno-utopian kool-aid.

Plenty of folks think Musk will do something smart someday, for humanity's benefit, despite all evidence to the contrary.

I was here when the web showed up, and I can honestly state that we featured blatant techno-utopian rhetoric in nearly every aspect of the industry, as well as our underground nocturnal allegedly musical entertainment.

I now feel rather dumb, aka a product of my time, but the notion that inventing tools would lead to them automatically being used for good was prevalent, if specious.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#82

Post by exe34 » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:17 PM UTC

mparnisari wrote: post #80

Okay, so Facebook started as a way to interconnect people. But it's a business, so it has to make money to survive. So they added ads. And now my feed is 99% ads, 1% updates from my friends. Sooooo mission accomplished, right? Right?

you get updates from your friends? the only reason I have Facebook is to see pictures of cats, but it insists on showing me hamas propaganda ai-slop.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#83

Post by mparnisari » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:17 PM UTC

Towaway69 wrote: post #32

page 27 > Zuckerbergs's Law: The amount each person shares doubles each year. I initially thought wealth, ideas and love was meant but no ... it's just data.

Why would you think it was anything BUT data?

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#84

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

There's a lot of altruistic sounding stuff about connection in there, but it's hard to believe it's sincere when their product is a space where paid accounts don't have to bother with consent.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#85

Post by jonas21 » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:19 PM UTC

chucknthem wrote: post #75

I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.

Lots of people are still optimistic about tech. They just generally don't have time to get into silly arguments about it on HN.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#86

Post by cflewis » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:20 PM UTC

chucknthem wrote: post #75

I remember this. Wish I'd kept my little piece of history. Written at a time when people were still optimistic and hopeful about tech.

Yeah, the dreams of what computers could do around Windows 95, and what the Internet could do around Windows 98/Windows 2000... it felt amazing as a teenager who wanted to go into computer science. IMHO social media heralded the beginning of the end, although no-one knew that at the time.

A lot of the 90s nostalgia is just the same rose-tinted glasses as all generations experience, but I think in this one dimension it truly felt a lot better back then.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#87

Post by hobom » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:21 PM UTC

genericspammer wrote: post #42

[flagged]

As far as I know that was a distinct, previous endeavor. Only afterwards did the Vinklevoi approach him to make the website, an idea which he then allegedly ran with on his own.

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#88

Post by jmyeet » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:22 PM UTC

How far we've come in a little over a decade.

If you're working for Big Tech now, you're basically working for a defense contractor. Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta are really no different to Boeing, Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman.

Meta was culpable in the Rohingya genocide [1], builds AI for the military [2], silences content about Palestine (with deep ties to the Netanyahu government) [3] and Zuckerberg is cozying up to the incoming Trump administration [4].

We're so far away from Sergey Brin's principled stance against China [5]. You can find similar lists to the above for Google, Microsoft or Amazon.

[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/05/meta-allo...

[3]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2023/12/21/metas-broken-promises/...

[4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c87x98q8y08o

[5]: https://archive.is/tOWfY

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#89

Post by Frummy » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

"complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency breeds complacency"

So funny!

Re: Facebook's Little Red Book

#90

Post by scrubs » Mon, Dec 02, 2024, 10:24 PM UTC

lbrito wrote: post #61

Web 2.0-era peak hubris. A decade later, its hard to decide if this looks delusional or prophetic - they did change societies, but probably not in the ways they ostensibly wanted to be recognized for changing.

Bingo ... let's not confuse a techie for a messaging app selling ad data as a tech savant (almost) brilliantly predicting the future because it tries to bootstrap itself into the stratosphere with a flourish of art copy & paste by association with pictures of CERN, Egyptian hieroglyphics and so on.

The latter are cool ... and stand well in time. CERN requires something a tad more complicated that pushing around "lol :)" over tcp-ip done before them + "big data" analysis to sell it to morons on madison street.

Claude Shannon, von Neumann, creators of the transistor, capacitors, languages, algos etc are the cool+smart kids ... not Zuckerberg. Not Facebook.

"Move fast and break" things has some tactical truth in larthargic companies, but averaged over time is asymptomatically a zero. It's just SV frat boy talk. Enough.