5 ms·

An apology for the internet from the people who built it

48 points by dschuetz 9y ago

teleclimber 9y ago
Note: misleading title. This is not about the internet, or the World Wide Web, it's about Facebook and other social media networks. The very first sentences seems to conflate internet and Facebook: "Something has gone wrong with the internet. Even Mark Zuckerberg knows it. Testifying before Congress, the Facebook CEO ticked off a list of everything his platform has screwed up"
- dschuetz 9y ago
  It's an interview, actually. The important part is below, where "the people who built it" talk about what went wrong. It's about the Internet since the beginning. Instead of taking the actual title, I decided to use the title in the URL which is more accurate.
  - teleclimber 9y ago
    The people who built it did not build the internet, they built the social platforms and ad systems that run on top of the internet. The internet existed long before these people built what they built.
    - dschuetz 9y ago
      Yes, we all know that. But how many users did the early Internet have, and how many now? And who helped it grow? People like those who contemplate in the interview.
      - rgbrenner 9y ago
        Facebook wasn't that early to the internet. When it opened for public access in 2006, there were 1 billion internet users.
- djhworld 9y ago
  I guess from a mainstream perspective, Facebook _is_ the internet for many people.
yosito 9y ago
The author of this article needs to stay after class and write "Mark Zuckerberg did not create the internet" 100 times on the blackboard.
- ams6110 9y ago
  That point of view is what a lot of "typical" users of the internet think. The internet is Facebook and Google and maybe Twitter. They don't separate the network from those platforms. Some don't even have a clear idea that links they follow from Facebook or Twitter lead to websites that are distinct from those platforms.
  - dschuetz 9y ago
    ...and they want the users to keep thinking that. The online ad industry is awfully quiet, you do not hear or read anywhere how lucrative it is. The users shall keep thinking that the Internet is for Facebook. The boards of the online companies shall keep focusing on growth at all cost. That's what the article actually says. And the interview below confirms it.
everdev 9y ago
It has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with free speech and it's boundaries. Do I have the right to misinform? To I have the right to insult or bully? Am I liable if I say something that causes distress? An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? These questions have been around since the birth of free speech and have been answered by many societies in very different ways. It's just accelerated and amplified on the Internet.
- cfadvan 9y ago
  An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? If that was your intent, then absolutely, legally at least you’re civilly and criminally on the hook. See: inciting riot. Even it wasn’t your intent, if a court finds that a reasonable person should have predicted the outcome, yes. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences or responsibility. I realize that this may be unpalatable for some who’s idea or free speech differs from the legal reality, so please understand that I’m just laying out the legal landscape. You are of course, free to believe in whatever you wish should be, I’m just addressing what is. @Jack9 The solution to abuses of the law isn’t to throw out the law, but throw out the abuse. I despise idealistic arguments that ignore the reality of daily enforcement. Most people brought up on charges of assault and battery are not being framed or railroaded, they committed assault and battery. The times when those laws are abused need to be aggressively addressed, but not by attacking the law in general unless it’s badly written. For example, traffic and public order laws can be used to good effect, or to harass a group of people. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to have those laws, but the underlying issues thst lead to people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum being disproportionately targeted, and then poorly represented. It’s good that everyone can’t just parade through downtown every rush hour, but bad when those same regulations are used as flimsy excuses to deny people their right to assembly. The real problems are more subtle and difficult to address than most people understand or care to admit. There is no Platonic ideal of law or ideology that can withstand human intentions and abuses. We need to focus less on perfecting an imperfect system, and more on the underlying abuses. Otherwise you get things that look good on paper, but are trivially subverted. In theory the US president can’t declare war, but 17 years ago the US congress put the US effectively in a state of perpetual war so they’re out of the intended loop. Even before that how long was Vietnam a “police action?” exactly? The systems have to be enacted by poeple, which is why putting decent people with good intentions in charge is so very fucking important!
luckydude 9y ago
I've been arguing with a friend of mine at Facebook about this. He's unrepentant, thinks it's just advertising and it is fine. I disagree, it's an advertising machine that is constantly looking over your shoulder and it reinforces whatever bubble you happen to be in. Here's a snippet of an email I sent him in this morning: Can you see how your attitude, if shared by the leaders at Facebook, is exactly why Facebook should get regulated? It's a my way or the highway, take no prisoners approach, and yeah, that will bring regulation. If your attitude was more like "yeah, I get it, it's a little creepy, we're trying to figure out a way to have a business model that works and isn't creepy" then perhaps you'd get to regulate yourself. The problem is that the lawmakers are clueless, you may well get some stupid draconian regulation that you really don't want. If that happens, you are going to look back at these emails and go "welp, we blew it, this is our fault".
- TAForObvReasons 9y ago
  > No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable … This is the crux of the problem. Until there's any sort of real accountability, the problems described in the article will persist. We can't expect anyone to act ethically or care about anything other than profits out of their own volition. It unfortunately has to be through regulations and punishment.
  - Phenomenit 9y ago
    It feels like lately no one that has some money and power is held accountable for anything in the US.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - _jal 9y ago
      Yep. I can't rationally explain why I feel this way, but I feel like that might be changing a little. The #MeToo things seems like a fore-shock of sorts. Some very large names, and possibly institutions, appear to be about to tumble under their corruption.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
malvosenior 9y ago
> To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. The technological elite are responsible for outrage culture? That's rich. It's old media that is packed, cover to cover with sensationalistic outrage pieces (such as this one from nymag). Now, those articles may get shared rapidly on social media but it's the traditional media that is their source. The underlying tone of a lot of the outrage pieces is simple: our business model and ability to gatekeep opinions is threatened by technology, and we will spin every article to subtly attack that.
Mononokay 9y ago
That's absolutely stupid - the internet's been the best thing to happen to the earth in millennia, if not ever. Apologizing for it would be like apologizing for modern medicine. > Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit. Filed major gender-discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins. > Can Duruk, programmer and tech writer. Served as project lead at Uber. Ah. These people. Not sure what they've built, really. Certainly not the internet. Pao certainly didn't build reddit, and I'm fairly sure Duruk didn't build the first prototype of Uber. > Richard Stallman, MIT programmer. Created legendary software GNU and Emacs. First of all, it's not "GNU Plus Internet;" secondly, Stallman barely even uses the internet and even stopped programming way before it was relevant. GNU isn't software. I'm also 80% sure those quotes of him are fake.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  Pao also lost her discrimination suit. That fact is conveniently left out of her history. I can claim anything I want but if a jury finds my claims to be false, I don't know how that makes me some sort of expert (let alone someone who "created" the internet).
zamalek 9y ago
Every invention has a dark side. * The wheel: war machines. * Writing: propaganda. * Jewelry: diamond cartels. * Internal combustion engine: pollution. * Nuclear energy: nuclear weaponry. * Wind turbines: dead birds. * Cell phones: the death of social skills. Pick any technology and you could probably find a way that it has caused severe problems. It almost seems like a fundamental law of the universe. The most incredible thing about the internet is that it works across vendors and across countries. The concept of the entire human race coming together and agreeing on a way to do things is excessively rare and the internet is an example of that - the only example that I can think of right now. Despite all the war, despite all the hatred, we can agree on internet protocols. The internet is an incredible accomplishment and the creators should be proud. Those who have soured it are responsible for the state it is in today, nobody else.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  It's unfortunate this is downvoted because you're exactly right. Those analogies are spot on. This article blames the internet (a bigger, broader, very useful thing) for the negative actions of specific companies (mostly facebook).. this is exactly the same as blaming the wheel for war machines; or writing for propaganda. Put the blame where it belongs. The internet owes no one an apology. Facebook on the other hand...
petermcneeley 9y ago
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." — John Perry Barlow If this is the founding computer visionary do we really have to wonder what went wrong?
mindcrime 9y ago
McNamee: They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. Ironically, this seems to be exactly what this article is trying to do - evoke outrage.
- dschuetz 9y ago
  It depends on how you read it. Contemplative readers might get upset too for a bit, but then focus on the actual problem - how to fix it?
- joejerryronnie 9y ago
  The authors are no dummies, they've got a business model to support!
yawaramin 9y ago
The article introduces an interesting guy: > Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. He puts in some good points in the first couple of sections about how the internet was built on hippie good intentions, and how Wall St came in and made it about money, but the really interesting thing is how in the next section, about online ads and how they turned into a mass surveillance regime, he's totally silent. Makes me think this is a bit of a puff piece for these people, who were all totally complacent at the time, speaking up now about how they went wrong, except they have nothing to say about what they personally did. This doesn't look much like an apology. Edit: wow, here's another beauty from Garcia: > The algorithm, by default, placates you by shielding you from the things you don’t want to hear about. That, to me, is the scary part. The real problem isn’t Facebook — it’s humans.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  The internet was actually built on cold war ideas about how to survive and communicate after a nuclear attack. Maybe you could make the case that consumer computing was based on hippie ideals (Whole Earth Catalog...), but the internet didn't get big until well after those thoughts had turned very commercial.
  - nixpulvis 9y ago
    I think there's a key dostinction to be made here between the internet and the WWW.
    - malvosenior 9y ago
      There are tons of distinctions to be made. The internet is comprised of a multitude of protocols, applications and use cases. Blogs/newspapers like this are different than social media, old school forums, apps, co-op games, p2p file sharing, chat... This is an overly broad and reactionary article that's trying to equate recent outrage around FB with the internet as a whole.
      - 9y ago
rgbrenner 9y ago
As someone who doesnt use facebook at all, or ever... I'm getting tired of this. The internet is not facebook. Facebook doesn't control you, and the internet doesnt owe you an apology. The internet is a fantastic invention, that has opened up opportunities all over the world; has lessened communications costs drastically, and enabled capabilities we have never had before. If you are so outraged with facebook, stop going to it.
- dschuetz 9y ago
  ...and the article is not about Facebook.
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    yes it is. It's 100% about facebook. Ads on the internet have been around for 25 years. Google alone has been selling ads for 18 years. What do you imagine caused them to write this story 2 days after Zuckerbergs apology testimony to congress?
    - nixpulvis 9y ago
      The recent motivation might be Facebook, it it's absolutely true that the internet as a whole is suffering. How bad has it been in the past, how much is a skewed lens is up for debate.
    - nickbauman 9y ago
      Ads have never been used quite the way they have in 2016 on Facebook. The network effects happen to be extremely strong for Facebook in particular but it could have been any incumbent that was the platform of greatest damage. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean we don't have a real problem here.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - nickbauman 9y ago
nickbauman 9y ago
The rise of White Supremacy makes total sense here when you consider that racism is an effective system of oppression because it subjugates whites as well as non-whites by sowing fear of downward mobility among the lighter population while vilifying the disenfranchised. If one is white and has problems, the goal is to hate these darker people that can't really fight back. Allow the real exploiters a free hand.
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  If your a shitty person maybe. While I feel your frustration, it's important to stay grounded in the real world, where people are still more often good.
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    Not shitty, just very susceptible to being scared. Scared people are rarely "good."
    - nixpulvis 9y ago
      If you hate because your scared you're shitty.
originalsimba 9y ago
Facebook is not the internet, and Mr. Zuckerberg had literally _nothing to do with building any single piece of the entire internet_. The story is about Facebook and Zuckerberg and the headline is misleading. More importantly, why are garbage stories from "journalists" who don't know the material they're writing about ending up on HN?
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  >More importantly, why are garbage stories from "journalists" who don't know the material they're writing about ending up on HN? I think the idea is that people here can deconstruct the post and point out its flaws (as you started to in your first paragraph). Then other folks on the web can link to them.
pluto9 9y ago
This is quite an impressive display of hubris for most of these people to claim to have "built the internet". And of the fraction of them who have built anything at all, most built things that were intentionally designed to do the things they're apologizing for now that the public has become annoyed by them, so this "apology" rings hollow. This isn't a "sorry we did this" apology. It's a "sorry you're mad about it" apology.
badcede 9y ago
These windbags did not build the internet.

48 points by dschuetz 9y ago

Note: misleading title. This is not about the internet, or the World Wide Web, it's about Facebook and other social media networks. The very first sentences seems to conflate internet and Facebook: "Something has gone wrong with the internet. Even Mark Zuckerberg knows it. Testifying before Congress, the Facebook CEO ticked off a list of everything his platform has screwed up"

dschuetz 9y ago
It's an interview, actually. The important part is below, where "the people who built it" talk about what went wrong. It's about the Internet since the beginning. Instead of taking the actual title, I decided to use the title in the URL which is more accurate.
- teleclimber 9y ago
  The people who built it did not build the internet, they built the social platforms and ad systems that run on top of the internet. The internet existed long before these people built what they built.
  - dschuetz 9y ago
    Yes, we all know that. But how many users did the early Internet have, and how many now? And who helped it grow? People like those who contemplate in the interview.
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      Facebook wasn't that early to the internet. When it opened for public access in 2006, there were 1 billion internet users.
djhworld 9y ago
I guess from a mainstream perspective, Facebook _is_ the internet for many people.

yosito 9y ago

The author of this article needs to stay after class and write "Mark Zuckerberg did not create the internet" 100 times on the blackboard.

ams6110 9y ago
That point of view is what a lot of "typical" users of the internet think. The internet is Facebook and Google and maybe Twitter. They don't separate the network from those platforms. Some don't even have a clear idea that links they follow from Facebook or Twitter lead to websites that are distinct from those platforms.
- dschuetz 9y ago
  ...and they want the users to keep thinking that. The online ad industry is awfully quiet, you do not hear or read anywhere how lucrative it is. The users shall keep thinking that the Internet is for Facebook. The boards of the online companies shall keep focusing on growth at all cost. That's what the article actually says. And the interview below confirms it.

everdev 9y ago

It has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with free speech and it's boundaries. Do I have the right to misinform? To I have the right to insult or bully? Am I liable if I say something that causes distress? An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? These questions have been around since the birth of free speech and have been answered by many societies in very different ways. It's just accelerated and amplified on the Internet.

cfadvan 9y ago
An I liable if my speech encourages or inspires a third party to break a law? If that was your intent, then absolutely, legally at least you’re civilly and criminally on the hook. See: inciting riot. Even it wasn’t your intent, if a court finds that a reasonable person should have predicted the outcome, yes. Freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences or responsibility. I realize that this may be unpalatable for some who’s idea or free speech differs from the legal reality, so please understand that I’m just laying out the legal landscape. You are of course, free to believe in whatever you wish should be, I’m just addressing what is. @Jack9 The solution to abuses of the law isn’t to throw out the law, but throw out the abuse. I despise idealistic arguments that ignore the reality of daily enforcement. Most people brought up on charges of assault and battery are not being framed or railroaded, they committed assault and battery. The times when those laws are abused need to be aggressively addressed, but not by attacking the law in general unless it’s badly written. For example, traffic and public order laws can be used to good effect, or to harass a group of people. The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to have those laws, but the underlying issues thst lead to people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum being disproportionately targeted, and then poorly represented. It’s good that everyone can’t just parade through downtown every rush hour, but bad when those same regulations are used as flimsy excuses to deny people their right to assembly. The real problems are more subtle and difficult to address than most people understand or care to admit. There is no Platonic ideal of law or ideology that can withstand human intentions and abuses. We need to focus less on perfecting an imperfect system, and more on the underlying abuses. Otherwise you get things that look good on paper, but are trivially subverted. In theory the US president can’t declare war, but 17 years ago the US congress put the US effectively in a state of perpetual war so they’re out of the intended loop. Even before that how long was Vietnam a “police action?” exactly? The systems have to be enacted by poeple, which is why putting decent people with good intentions in charge is so very fucking important!

luckydude 9y ago

I've been arguing with a friend of mine at Facebook about this. He's unrepentant, thinks it's just advertising and it is fine. I disagree, it's an advertising machine that is constantly looking over your shoulder and it reinforces whatever bubble you happen to be in. Here's a snippet of an email I sent him in this morning: Can you see how your attitude, if shared by the leaders at Facebook, is exactly why Facebook should get regulated? It's a my way or the highway, take no prisoners approach, and yeah, that will bring regulation. If your attitude was more like "yeah, I get it, it's a little creepy, we're trying to figure out a way to have a business model that works and isn't creepy" then perhaps you'd get to regulate yourself. The problem is that the lawmakers are clueless, you may well get some stupid draconian regulation that you really don't want. If that happens, you are going to look back at these emails and go "welp, we blew it, this is our fault".

TAForObvReasons 9y ago
> No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable … This is the crux of the problem. Until there's any sort of real accountability, the problems described in the article will persist. We can't expect anyone to act ethically or care about anything other than profits out of their own volition. It unfortunately has to be through regulations and punishment.
- Phenomenit 9y ago
  It feels like lately no one that has some money and power is held accountable for anything in the US.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - _jal 9y ago
    Yep. I can't rationally explain why I feel this way, but I feel like that might be changing a little. The #MeToo things seems like a fore-shock of sorts. Some very large names, and possibly institutions, appear to be about to tumble under their corruption.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

malvosenior 9y ago

> To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. The technological elite are responsible for outrage culture? That's rich. It's old media that is packed, cover to cover with sensationalistic outrage pieces (such as this one from nymag). Now, those articles may get shared rapidly on social media but it's the traditional media that is their source. The underlying tone of a lot of the outrage pieces is simple: our business model and ability to gatekeep opinions is threatened by technology, and we will spin every article to subtly attack that.

Mononokay 9y ago

That's absolutely stupid - the internet's been the best thing to happen to the earth in millennia, if not ever. Apologizing for it would be like apologizing for modern medicine. > Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit. Filed major gender-discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins. > Can Duruk, programmer and tech writer. Served as project lead at Uber. Ah. These people. Not sure what they've built, really. Certainly not the internet. Pao certainly didn't build reddit, and I'm fairly sure Duruk didn't build the first prototype of Uber. > Richard Stallman, MIT programmer. Created legendary software GNU and Emacs. First of all, it's not "GNU Plus Internet;" secondly, Stallman barely even uses the internet and even stopped programming way before it was relevant. GNU isn't software. I'm also 80% sure those quotes of him are fake.

malvosenior 9y ago
Pao also lost her discrimination suit. That fact is conveniently left out of her history. I can claim anything I want but if a jury finds my claims to be false, I don't know how that makes me some sort of expert (let alone someone who "created" the internet).

zamalek 9y ago

Every invention has a dark side. * The wheel: war machines. * Writing: propaganda. * Jewelry: diamond cartels. * Internal combustion engine: pollution. * Nuclear energy: nuclear weaponry. * Wind turbines: dead birds. * Cell phones: the death of social skills. Pick any technology and you could probably find a way that it has caused severe problems. It almost seems like a fundamental law of the universe. The most incredible thing about the internet is that it works across vendors and across countries. The concept of the entire human race coming together and agreeing on a way to do things is excessively rare and the internet is an example of that - the only example that I can think of right now. Despite all the war, despite all the hatred, we can agree on internet protocols. The internet is an incredible accomplishment and the creators should be proud. Those who have soured it are responsible for the state it is in today, nobody else.

rgbrenner 9y ago
It's unfortunate this is downvoted because you're exactly right. Those analogies are spot on. This article blames the internet (a bigger, broader, very useful thing) for the negative actions of specific companies (mostly facebook).. this is exactly the same as blaming the wheel for war machines; or writing for propaganda. Put the blame where it belongs. The internet owes no one an apology. Facebook on the other hand...

petermcneeley 9y ago

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." — John Perry Barlow If this is the founding computer visionary do we really have to wonder what went wrong?

mindcrime 9y ago

McNamee: They’re basically trying to trigger fear and anger to get the outrage cycle going, because outrage is what makes you be more deeply engaged. You spend more time on the site and you share more stuff. Therefore, you’re going to be exposed to more ads, and that makes you more valuable. Ironically, this seems to be exactly what this article is trying to do - evoke outrage.

dschuetz 9y ago
It depends on how you read it. Contemplative readers might get upset too for a bit, but then focus on the actual problem - how to fix it?
joejerryronnie 9y ago
The authors are no dummies, they've got a business model to support!

yawaramin 9y ago

The article introduces an interesting guy: > Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. He puts in some good points in the first couple of sections about how the internet was built on hippie good intentions, and how Wall St came in and made it about money, but the really interesting thing is how in the next section, about online ads and how they turned into a mass surveillance regime, he's totally silent. Makes me think this is a bit of a puff piece for these people, who were all totally complacent at the time, speaking up now about how they went wrong, except they have nothing to say about what they personally did. This doesn't look much like an apology. Edit: wow, here's another beauty from Garcia: > The algorithm, by default, placates you by shielding you from the things you don’t want to hear about. That, to me, is the scary part. The real problem isn’t Facebook — it’s humans.

malvosenior 9y ago
The internet was actually built on cold war ideas about how to survive and communicate after a nuclear attack. Maybe you could make the case that consumer computing was based on hippie ideals (Whole Earth Catalog...), but the internet didn't get big until well after those thoughts had turned very commercial.
- nixpulvis 9y ago
  I think there's a key dostinction to be made here between the internet and the WWW.
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    There are tons of distinctions to be made. The internet is comprised of a multitude of protocols, applications and use cases. Blogs/newspapers like this are different than social media, old school forums, apps, co-op games, p2p file sharing, chat... This is an overly broad and reactionary article that's trying to equate recent outrage around FB with the internet as a whole.
    - 9y ago

rgbrenner 9y ago

As someone who doesnt use facebook at all, or ever... I'm getting tired of this. The internet is not facebook. Facebook doesn't control you, and the internet doesnt owe you an apology. The internet is a fantastic invention, that has opened up opportunities all over the world; has lessened communications costs drastically, and enabled capabilities we have never had before. If you are so outraged with facebook, stop going to it.

dschuetz 9y ago
...and the article is not about Facebook.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  yes it is. It's 100% about facebook. Ads on the internet have been around for 25 years. Google alone has been selling ads for 18 years. What do you imagine caused them to write this story 2 days after Zuckerbergs apology testimony to congress?
  - nixpulvis 9y ago
    The recent motivation might be Facebook, it it's absolutely true that the internet as a whole is suffering. How bad has it been in the past, how much is a skewed lens is up for debate.
  - nickbauman 9y ago
    Ads have never been used quite the way they have in 2016 on Facebook. The network effects happen to be extremely strong for Facebook in particular but it could have been any incumbent that was the platform of greatest damage. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean we don't have a real problem here.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - nickbauman 9y ago

nickbauman 9y ago

The rise of White Supremacy makes total sense here when you consider that racism is an effective system of oppression because it subjugates whites as well as non-whites by sowing fear of downward mobility among the lighter population while vilifying the disenfranchised. If one is white and has problems, the goal is to hate these darker people that can't really fight back. Allow the real exploiters a free hand.

nixpulvis 9y ago
If your a shitty person maybe. While I feel your frustration, it's important to stay grounded in the real world, where people are still more often good.
- nickbauman 9y ago
  Not shitty, just very susceptible to being scared. Scared people are rarely "good."
  - nixpulvis 9y ago
    If you hate because your scared you're shitty.

originalsimba 9y ago

Facebook is not the internet, and Mr. Zuckerberg had literally _nothing to do with building any single piece of the entire internet_. The story is about Facebook and Zuckerberg and the headline is misleading. More importantly, why are garbage stories from "journalists" who don't know the material they're writing about ending up on HN?

18pfsmt 9y ago
>More importantly, why are garbage stories from "journalists" who don't know the material they're writing about ending up on HN? I think the idea is that people here can deconstruct the post and point out its flaws (as you started to in your first paragraph). Then other folks on the web can link to them.

pluto9 9y ago

This is quite an impressive display of hubris for most of these people to claim to have "built the internet". And of the fraction of them who have built anything at all, most built things that were intentionally designed to do the things they're apologizing for now that the public has become annoyed by them, so this "apology" rings hollow. This isn't a "sorry we did this" apology. It's a "sorry you're mad about it" apology.

badcede 9y ago

These windbags did not build the internet.