6 ms·

The Infuriating Innocence of Mark Zuckerberg

28 points by schrodinger 9y ago

cirgue 9y ago
The way to fix Facebook is to build a better platform and allow Facebook to go the way of myspace.
- CodeMage 9y ago
  Facebook is not the problem we need to fix, it's a symptom of an underlying problem.
  - 18pfsmt 9y ago
    You simply need to elaborate on the, "underlying problem" or you are blowing smoke.
- jandrese 9y ago
  There is a treadmill effect where someone builds a site without all of the terrible misfeatures of the old and starts gathering huge numbers of people. Then they need to pay for staff/servers/bandwidth/shareholders/etc... and have to start monetizing and pretty soon they have all of the stuff that people hated on the old site.
  - NoGravitas 9y ago
    That's really only a problem for centralized services, though. Federated services (like Mastodon[0]) don't really have this problem, because they scale horizontally over lots of small instances that can be supported by donations or co-op membership fees. And distributed services like Secure Scuttlebutt[1] don't have this problem at all, because every user pays for their own use. Beyond the self-inflicted problem of trying to scale one system to support the whole world, having to make a profit rather than just be self-supporting drives the need to monetize and use dark patterns. [0]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [1]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
- Thriptic 9y ago
  It's not a platform issue, it's a monetization issue. Somehow social networks have to make money, and that either involves charging users which pisses people off, or relying on the fact that people don't properly value their time and / or information and selling them ads. Selling ads incentivizes aggressive data mining, and then you're right back to the situation we have now.
  - microwavecamera 9y ago
    I think the best solution would be to create an open, non-profit, publicly funded platform similar to Wikipedia. Besides I believe it's possible to have advertising on commercial sites and still be ethical.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      ActivityPub [1] is a W3 recommendation for protocol for social networks communicating a federated p2p manner. It is used by open source social networks like Mastedon and PeerTube to interact with eachother. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub
      - 18pfsmt 9y ago
        Practically speaking, all of us that care about these sorts of things already know about Mastodon, if not ActivityPub and GnuSocial, etc. We have lots of potential FB competitors to root for right now.
        microwavecamera 9y ago
        There's a few other good ones too: https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org https://www.humhub.org/en https://www.humhub.org/en https://www.oxwall.com https://www.oxwall.com https://elgg.org https://elgg.org - site seems to be having issues right now https://friendi.ca https://friendi.ca
  - cirgue 9y ago
Irishsteve 9y ago
The article paints a picture of how hard Mark has it - just remember for all the suffering he is going through he has billions of dollars. It's tough being at the top :-)
- dang 9y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
- elorant 9y ago
  So what, billionaires don't have problems?
  - trophycase 9y ago
    He could step down, dissolve the company, or tell the truth and all of these "problems" would just go away.
    - elorant 9y ago
      Dude get real, please. He couldn't dissolve the company even if he wanted to.
nambit 9y ago
How are people still obsessed about facebook. Where was all this rage for the equifax hack? It boggles my mind.
- hackinthebochs 9y ago
  I'm convinced this is a media-created tempest in a teapot. From what I've seen, regular people just don't care all that much. The media latches on to any issue with facebook because it brings in more eyeballs.
  - TAForObvReasons 9y ago
    > The best and the brightest have been heading to Silicon Valley because they want to build the future. ... “Tech” implies an intellectual practice in which engineers build neat things to improve the world. The major tech companies are businesses. That’s all they are. They innovate how to make money. This extends far beyond Facebook or the recent scandal, and gets to the heart of a deep rift over the last few decades. Many people have had a deep skepticism over technology and its motivations, and the broad-scale beliefs about "making the world a better place" are really being called into question now.
    - trophycase 9y ago
      > They innovate how to make money I've never heard this before but that's a very interesting point!
- en4bz 9y ago
  Facebook is in direct competition with old media. Equifax is not.
- badcede 9y ago
  Name recognition.
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  Because Equifax was hacked while Facebook knowingly provided or sold people's personal data. I fully agree Equifax was criminally negligent and should have been nailed to the wall for it, but what FB did/still does is premeditated.
mtgx 9y ago
Also these were Zuckerberg's talking points, which he had prepared for all the potential questions. I think it does show that his answers are mostly "scripted" and not necessarily genuine or coming from a place of honesty. https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968 https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968 Direct image link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large
- d1zzy 9y ago
  That's not what it shows, it simply shows he has prepared for a number of questions. If he was the one to come up with those answers (potentially running them by lawyers and PR just like you have to do for any public communication when you are a CEO of a publicly traded company) then it's still coming from a place of "honesty", it would be his genuine opinions. In order to say that he wasn't being honest you have to prove that those answers were prepared by someone else.
Animats 9y ago
The real problem is advertising. "You're not the customer, you're the product". We've been here before. Back in the 1950s, when TV commercials appeared, the ad industry was portrayed as a villain. "Selling out to Madison Avenue" was considered a despicable act for a writer. There were books on the evils of ads - "The Hidden Persuaders" (Packard, 1957). The US Congress held hearings on the evils of television. TV did change the world. For the first time ever, ordinary people had more free entertainment coming in than they could consume. That had never happened before in all of history. Facebook is a new technology for delivering ads. The problems come from being ad-supported, not the nature of a social network. If Facebook were a paid service without ads, most of the intrusiveness would go away. What we need to regulate is advertising, not networking.
- cafard 9y ago
  In the 1950s, and much more recently, the ad industry had to make guesses, based on very limited data, about who was seeing what ads on broadcast media. Sure, the ads for auto batteries and tires ran with football games, not with soap operas. But compared to what you can do with on-line media, they were working in the dark.
- lbearl 9y ago
  That's an interesting take. Facebook is basically Television 2.0, with all of the advantages (free entertainment) that come with inherent costs (advertising), and as was pointed out in a sibling, with TV the advertisers didn't have nearly as much information as they do now. I wonder if the same parallels would be applicable to broadcast vs cable TV? Namely: ad supported (broadcast), versus subscriber supported with additional ads (cable). More broadly I wonder if that is a direction we'll see social networks start moving into, to date, I don't believe any pay-for social network has gotten any real traction.
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  I’ve always liked your historical perspectives (often times controversial). I’m not really into regulations at all, but it’s not the advertising that is such an issue, it’s the surveillance required to accomplish ‘targeted advertising’ that’s more of the issue these days. Infomercials on broadcast TV are one thing, but actual tracking of your viewership is entirely different (connected to your home address/credit score/demographic specifics). >...you're the product” I know pithy sayings are popular right now, but HN should probably stay away from that sort of demagoguery. November 29, 2010 is the first time I can find that phrase being used on HN (in a Lifehacker post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952292
Maxwell101 9y ago
I applied for a loan to boast up my new business about a couple of weeks ago.To my greatest surprise my score was very low of 545 and i was rejected,I almost lost with no hope until i ran into an old friend i explained my problem to him and he introduced me to his permanent hacker who always helped him to hack all sort of hack,I have no choice and i decided to give him a try and he help me to raise my credit score to 827.I had a bet with my friend i was going to reveal the hacker to the world if he should fix my credit score. Well here I am recommending:(garymckinnoncyberservice@gmail.com)for your credit score & credit report issues and all sort of hack.Give him a try so you could also share your own testimony to the world as well...

28 points by schrodinger 9y ago

cirgue 9y ago

The way to fix Facebook is to build a better platform and allow Facebook to go the way of myspace.

CodeMage 9y ago
Facebook is not the problem we need to fix, it's a symptom of an underlying problem.
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  You simply need to elaborate on the, "underlying problem" or you are blowing smoke.
jandrese 9y ago
There is a treadmill effect where someone builds a site without all of the terrible misfeatures of the old and starts gathering huge numbers of people. Then they need to pay for staff/servers/bandwidth/shareholders/etc... and have to start monetizing and pretty soon they have all of the stuff that people hated on the old site.
- NoGravitas 9y ago
  That's really only a problem for centralized services, though. Federated services (like Mastodon[0]) don't really have this problem, because they scale horizontally over lots of small instances that can be supported by donations or co-op membership fees. And distributed services like Secure Scuttlebutt[1] don't have this problem at all, because every user pays for their own use. Beyond the self-inflicted problem of trying to scale one system to support the whole world, having to make a profit rather than just be self-supporting drives the need to monetize and use dark patterns. [0]: https://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/ [1]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
Thriptic 9y ago
It's not a platform issue, it's a monetization issue. Somehow social networks have to make money, and that either involves charging users which pisses people off, or relying on the fact that people don't properly value their time and / or information and selling them ads. Selling ads incentivizes aggressive data mining, and then you're right back to the situation we have now.
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  I think the best solution would be to create an open, non-profit, publicly funded platform similar to Wikipedia. Besides I believe it's possible to have advertising on commercial sites and still be ethical.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    ActivityPub [1] is a W3 recommendation for protocol for social networks communicating a federated p2p manner. It is used by open source social networks like Mastedon and PeerTube to interact with eachother. https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub
    - 18pfsmt 9y ago
      Practically speaking, all of us that care about these sorts of things already know about Mastodon, if not ActivityPub and GnuSocial, etc. We have lots of potential FB competitors to root for right now.
      - microwavecamera 9y ago
        There's a few other good ones too: https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org https://www.opensource-socialnetwork.org https://www.humhub.org/en https://www.humhub.org/en https://www.oxwall.com https://www.oxwall.com https://elgg.org https://elgg.org - site seems to be having issues right now https://friendi.ca https://friendi.ca
- cirgue 9y ago

Irishsteve 9y ago

The article paints a picture of how hard Mark has it - just remember for all the suffering he is going through he has billions of dollars. It's tough being at the top :-)

dang 9y ago
Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
elorant 9y ago
So what, billionaires don't have problems?
- trophycase 9y ago
  He could step down, dissolve the company, or tell the truth and all of these "problems" would just go away.
  - elorant 9y ago
    Dude get real, please. He couldn't dissolve the company even if he wanted to.

nambit 9y ago

How are people still obsessed about facebook. Where was all this rage for the equifax hack? It boggles my mind.

hackinthebochs 9y ago
I'm convinced this is a media-created tempest in a teapot. From what I've seen, regular people just don't care all that much. The media latches on to any issue with facebook because it brings in more eyeballs.
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  > The best and the brightest have been heading to Silicon Valley because they want to build the future. ... “Tech” implies an intellectual practice in which engineers build neat things to improve the world. The major tech companies are businesses. That’s all they are. They innovate how to make money. This extends far beyond Facebook or the recent scandal, and gets to the heart of a deep rift over the last few decades. Many people have had a deep skepticism over technology and its motivations, and the broad-scale beliefs about "making the world a better place" are really being called into question now.
  - trophycase 9y ago
    > They innovate how to make money I've never heard this before but that's a very interesting point!
en4bz 9y ago
Facebook is in direct competition with old media. Equifax is not.
badcede 9y ago
Name recognition.
microwavecamera 9y ago
Because Equifax was hacked while Facebook knowingly provided or sold people's personal data. I fully agree Equifax was criminally negligent and should have been nailed to the wall for it, but what FB did/still does is premeditated.

mtgx 9y ago

Also these were Zuckerberg's talking points, which he had prepared for all the potential questions. I think it does show that his answers are mostly "scripted" and not necessarily genuine or coming from a place of honesty. https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968 https://twitter.com/becket/status/983846618263891968 Direct image link: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DadTMxlW4AAUz_h.jpg:large

d1zzy 9y ago
That's not what it shows, it simply shows he has prepared for a number of questions. If he was the one to come up with those answers (potentially running them by lawyers and PR just like you have to do for any public communication when you are a CEO of a publicly traded company) then it's still coming from a place of "honesty", it would be his genuine opinions. In order to say that he wasn't being honest you have to prove that those answers were prepared by someone else.

Animats 9y ago

The real problem is advertising. "You're not the customer, you're the product". We've been here before. Back in the 1950s, when TV commercials appeared, the ad industry was portrayed as a villain. "Selling out to Madison Avenue" was considered a despicable act for a writer. There were books on the evils of ads - "The Hidden Persuaders" (Packard, 1957). The US Congress held hearings on the evils of television. TV did change the world. For the first time ever, ordinary people had more free entertainment coming in than they could consume. That had never happened before in all of history. Facebook is a new technology for delivering ads. The problems come from being ad-supported, not the nature of a social network. If Facebook were a paid service without ads, most of the intrusiveness would go away. What we need to regulate is advertising, not networking.

cafard 9y ago
In the 1950s, and much more recently, the ad industry had to make guesses, based on very limited data, about who was seeing what ads on broadcast media. Sure, the ads for auto batteries and tires ran with football games, not with soap operas. But compared to what you can do with on-line media, they were working in the dark.
lbearl 9y ago
That's an interesting take. Facebook is basically Television 2.0, with all of the advantages (free entertainment) that come with inherent costs (advertising), and as was pointed out in a sibling, with TV the advertisers didn't have nearly as much information as they do now. I wonder if the same parallels would be applicable to broadcast vs cable TV? Namely: ad supported (broadcast), versus subscriber supported with additional ads (cable). More broadly I wonder if that is a direction we'll see social networks start moving into, to date, I don't believe any pay-for social network has gotten any real traction.
18pfsmt 9y ago
I’ve always liked your historical perspectives (often times controversial). I’m not really into regulations at all, but it’s not the advertising that is such an issue, it’s the surveillance required to accomplish ‘targeted advertising’ that’s more of the issue these days. Infomercials on broadcast TV are one thing, but actual tracking of your viewership is entirely different (connected to your home address/credit score/demographic specifics). >...you're the product” I know pithy sayings are popular right now, but HN should probably stay away from that sort of demagoguery. November 29, 2010 is the first time I can find that phrase being used on HN (in a Lifehacker post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952292

Maxwell101 9y ago

I applied for a loan to boast up my new business about a couple of weeks ago.To my greatest surprise my score was very low of 545 and i was rejected,I almost lost with no hope until i ran into an old friend i explained my problem to him and he introduced me to his permanent hacker who always helped him to hack all sort of hack,I have no choice and i decided to give him a try and he help me to raise my credit score to 827.I had a bet with my friend i was going to reveal the hacker to the world if he should fix my credit score. Well here I am recommending:(garymckinnoncyberservice@gmail.com)for your credit score & credit report issues and all sort of hack.Give him a try so you could also share your own testimony to the world as well...