3 ms·

Apple CEO Tim Cook to MIT Grads: Don't Measure Your Life in Likes

94 points by gbugniot 9y ago

nnfy 9y ago
Isn't this just a generic graduation speech? I'm curious as to why anyone finds this noteworthy. It wouldn't surprise me if Cook didn't even write the speech himself.
- two2two 9y ago
  Parts of Cook’s speech are somewhat generic, but the point I believe to be important is a CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world is pleading with our future producers to acknowledge the damage certain aspects of online culture, such as likes, have on one’s psyche. It’s a subtle, “hey, somethings wrong. We can fix it by acknowledging it.” I, for one, am thrilled with Tim Cook and others, helping to bring these issues to light. It is a huge problem. I know someone in the other room right now that is fishing for likes and depending on her success, will determine her mood for the rest of the day, maybe week. It's psychological slavery that many have slipped into somewhat innocently.
  - muninn_ 9y ago
    Social media is the new smoking. Facebook et all. are hiring the most intelligent people in the world, software engineers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to get you to click on things and stay on their site. The studies are already starting to come out suggesting that social media is bad for your mental health, and it's largely a huge waste of time as you think you're maintaining relationships with people when you're really not, or you're afraid that if you don't use Facebook you can't ever reconnect with somebody you haven't spoken to in awhile. On top of everything else, Facebook in particular is a monopoly and needs to be broken up. There's no good reason that they should own like 4 of the top 5 social media platforms unless we're fine with monopolies. I'd like to see a federal anti-trust lawsuit, but the government doesn't understand how impossible it is to do the social media thing and not be crushed by Facebook.
    - xj9 9y ago
      you compete with facebook by doing things that facebook cannot do. gnu/social and mastodon are one step in that direction b/c they are ad free on purpose and provide a much more personal experience via gift economy. sure, some instances have a tip jar, but its easy enough to find a friend who has a private instance you can live on for free b/c they like you. of course, to compete properly things have to go further. #p2p applications and decentralized authentication systems to compete with "Sign-up with Facebook" and creating an ecosystem for competitive applications that don't rely on centralized infrastructure. facebook can and will crush you if you need to spend your way to victory. they're huge and rich. this is p obvious imo. so, to compete you have to make cost to the rando dev ~$0 so they can face the behemoth forever. that isn't to say you can't make money. totally possible to sell cloud services to boost performance or increase storage for users. the point is that it doesn't cost you anything to run in the first place and provides acceptable performance without the cloud speedups.
      - thisrod 9y ago
        Facebook's killer app was being the phone directory. Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That was really useful; it was lost in the email years between letters and Facebook messenger. Since no one got a distributed internet directory to work back then, it's hard to imagine that there will be one in the future. And so we're doomed to Facebook.
        xj9 9y ago
        \> doomed this is the doomed timeline, i suppose. no need to be so, uh, defeatist about it tho. building a facebook alternative/competitor isn't impossible, just hard. took forever, but #ostatus is finally making some headway against twitter. could happen again, right?
ben_jones 9y ago
Measure it in emojis instead!
azeirah 9y ago
If you're looking for an alternative to the likes metric, check out the "time well spent" metric. http://www.timewellspent.io/ http://www.timewellspent.io/
sogen 9y ago
Sounds like he just saw Fight Club
- racl101 9y ago
  Shhh! Rule 1! & Rule 2!
mi_lk 9y ago
Can't even find the source video[1] from the article. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjkz8zuMMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjkz8zuMMs
- TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
  Most modern media sites are absolutely despicable. They rarely link to the source. Heck, even when writing "articles" about recent scientific discoveries, most sites won't even mention the paper's title. Even worse, some sites will just add tags for common words and link to other articles with similar flags. They want to make you depend on their site, which is a terrible idea. Why would you possibly need to go review the sources, eh? In my personal ratings, I give all sites like these the lowest possible score.
  - dba7dba 9y ago
    I stopped reading 'articles' long ago. When I click on an article, I go straight to the comments section, knowing I will get more facts and balanced opinions from both sides of the story there, rather than the article itself.
  - cbhl 9y ago
    Replace "likes" with "ad impressions" and you'd get what's wrong with the media today. The answer is money -- if a journalist no longer needs to worry about having a roof over their head, or making ends meet, then they can go try to make the world a better place, rather than just writing click-bait headlines. I don't know how that will come about -- maybe UBI, maybe a new distribution model -- but the alternative is the slow rotting of the media industry.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dogruck 9y ago
Should I "like" this post?
racl101 9y ago
I wish someone would appropriate the Trainspotting speech into their grad speech (i.e. 'Choose Life').
booleanbetrayal 9y ago
"Measure it in app downloads!"
harry8 9y ago
Why should MIT grads listen to this guy? He's a suit, a politician. His contribution to the world is 2 parts of three eights of stuff all. Why is he even asked to give this speech? Fame. Because he's a suit at the top of the "APPLE" political ziggurat. Let's have George Clooney or a Kardashian give speeches to engineering grads telling them how to think? They're more famous than Cook. And arguably have done more in tech, not much less. Then there's this asshole who literally uses a commencement speech to bash a tech rival. If apple had "Likes" would he be saying this? MIT are supposed to be better than this.

94 points by gbugniot 9y ago

nnfy 9y ago

Isn't this just a generic graduation speech? I'm curious as to why anyone finds this noteworthy. It wouldn't surprise me if Cook didn't even write the speech himself.

two2two 9y ago
Parts of Cook’s speech are somewhat generic, but the point I believe to be important is a CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world is pleading with our future producers to acknowledge the damage certain aspects of online culture, such as likes, have on one’s psyche. It’s a subtle, “hey, somethings wrong. We can fix it by acknowledging it.” I, for one, am thrilled with Tim Cook and others, helping to bring these issues to light. It is a huge problem. I know someone in the other room right now that is fishing for likes and depending on her success, will determine her mood for the rest of the day, maybe week. It's psychological slavery that many have slipped into somewhat innocently.
- muninn_ 9y ago
  Social media is the new smoking. Facebook et all. are hiring the most intelligent people in the world, software engineers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to get you to click on things and stay on their site. The studies are already starting to come out suggesting that social media is bad for your mental health, and it's largely a huge waste of time as you think you're maintaining relationships with people when you're really not, or you're afraid that if you don't use Facebook you can't ever reconnect with somebody you haven't spoken to in awhile. On top of everything else, Facebook in particular is a monopoly and needs to be broken up. There's no good reason that they should own like 4 of the top 5 social media platforms unless we're fine with monopolies. I'd like to see a federal anti-trust lawsuit, but the government doesn't understand how impossible it is to do the social media thing and not be crushed by Facebook.
  - xj9 9y ago
    you compete with facebook by doing things that facebook cannot do. gnu/social and mastodon are one step in that direction b/c they are ad free on purpose and provide a much more personal experience via gift economy. sure, some instances have a tip jar, but its easy enough to find a friend who has a private instance you can live on for free b/c they like you. of course, to compete properly things have to go further. #p2p applications and decentralized authentication systems to compete with "Sign-up with Facebook" and creating an ecosystem for competitive applications that don't rely on centralized infrastructure. facebook can and will crush you if you need to spend your way to victory. they're huge and rich. this is p obvious imo. so, to compete you have to make cost to the rando dev ~$0 so they can face the behemoth forever. that isn't to say you can't make money. totally possible to sell cloud services to boost performance or increase storage for users. the point is that it doesn't cost you anything to run in the first place and provides acceptable performance without the cloud speedups.
    - thisrod 9y ago
      Facebook's killer app was being the phone directory. Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That was really useful; it was lost in the email years between letters and Facebook messenger. Since no one got a distributed internet directory to work back then, it's hard to imagine that there will be one in the future. And so we're doomed to Facebook.
      - xj9 9y ago
        \> doomed this is the doomed timeline, i suppose. no need to be so, uh, defeatist about it tho. building a facebook alternative/competitor isn't impossible, just hard. took forever, but #ostatus is finally making some headway against twitter. could happen again, right?

ben_jones 9y ago

Measure it in emojis instead!

azeirah 9y ago

If you're looking for an alternative to the likes metric, check out the "time well spent" metric. http://www.timewellspent.io/ http://www.timewellspent.io/

sogen 9y ago

Sounds like he just saw Fight Club

racl101 9y ago
Shhh! Rule 1! & Rule 2!

mi_lk 9y ago

Can't even find the source video[1] from the article. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjkz8zuMMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjkz8zuMMs

TheAceOfHearts 9y ago
Most modern media sites are absolutely despicable. They rarely link to the source. Heck, even when writing "articles" about recent scientific discoveries, most sites won't even mention the paper's title. Even worse, some sites will just add tags for common words and link to other articles with similar flags. They want to make you depend on their site, which is a terrible idea. Why would you possibly need to go review the sources, eh? In my personal ratings, I give all sites like these the lowest possible score.
- dba7dba 9y ago
  I stopped reading 'articles' long ago. When I click on an article, I go straight to the comments section, knowing I will get more facts and balanced opinions from both sides of the story there, rather than the article itself.
- cbhl 9y ago
  Replace "likes" with "ad impressions" and you'd get what's wrong with the media today. The answer is money -- if a journalist no longer needs to worry about having a roof over their head, or making ends meet, then they can go try to make the world a better place, rather than just writing click-bait headlines. I don't know how that will come about -- maybe UBI, maybe a new distribution model -- but the alternative is the slow rotting of the media industry.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

dogruck 9y ago

Should I "like" this post?

racl101 9y ago

I wish someone would appropriate the Trainspotting speech into their grad speech (i.e. 'Choose Life').

booleanbetrayal 9y ago

"Measure it in app downloads!"

harry8 9y ago

Why should MIT grads listen to this guy? He's a suit, a politician. His contribution to the world is 2 parts of three eights of stuff all. Why is he even asked to give this speech? Fame. Because he's a suit at the top of the "APPLE" political ziggurat. Let's have George Clooney or a Kardashian give speeches to engineering grads telling them how to think? They're more famous than Cook. And arguably have done more in tech, not much less. Then there's this asshole who literally uses a commencement speech to bash a tech rival. If apple had "Likes" would he be saying this? MIT are supposed to be better than this.