4 ms·

Can you tell me more about your previous affiliation with Facebook?

bertil 8y ago
I submitted a PhD topic to my adviser in 2004: Social media didn’t really exist then, not without civil identity, but I saw some versions of it, and recognised there a different type of network effect than those described under that name in the economic literature or in two-sided markets. I submitted that this would require a different type of monopoly enforcement. I started in 2005, trying to combine epidemiology, AL Barabasi’s work on complex network and competition policy. Initially, it sounded like the worst idea anyone ever had. I gradually changed how I introduced my work to… well, the long paragraph that you just read to, in 2008, “Is Facebook a monopoly?” which generally triggered very long agressive rants on how the company was evil, even then. I didn’t defend in 2009 because my lab submitted (after the 2007 crisis that triggered a lot of soul-searching in economic science) that any defence should include actual data, not simulations -- and I didn’t have access to Facebook actual data. I tried to get access some sample of it anyway, like many academics; my trick was to use not quizz, like Kogan but casual games, like FarmVille. So I worked as a data scientist for a gaming studio (that ended up being sued by Zynga because their game was too derivative from FarmVille). The player social graph was unusable because massively skewed by players befriending each other to benefit from a ‘viral’ hack in the game. I gradually forgot about my ambition to be called “Dr.”. At the same time, I was very attentive but hardly active in both ethnographic research on social networks (Ellison, Steinfield, boyd, Dutton & al.) and the technical side, the OpenSocialWeb and related platformisation of the web. When many researchers and key developers joined Facebook, and go attacked violently for what seemed like a reasonable decisions; actually, as I saw so much attacks on a company that was started by teenagers who very rapidly learned and grew up, I ended up in the paradoxal position of defending against everyone the company that I was forecasting to be the dusk of the Nation-state. A few close friends had learnt how to leverage a social platform in 2003, on a previous iteration; they were power-users (tailored publication, messaging friends to read their update) and loved the power it gave them. They didn’t see a problem; but I did: they were working for anti-competition authority and I needed to convince them that people who hated Facebook were wrong-but-not-wrong. Somehow, that argument failed to convince. I remained a full-time analyst of the company, and was the highest-voted contributor on Quora on all related topics for a while. That was easy: most employees wouldn’t touch the topics. Fast-forward 2014, where I had pretty much moved on making a living out of my understanding of the company; video games were not fun (most project failed) and I got a call to interview there. I was very excited, mainly because I really wanted to talk to anyone there, at all, at this point. Also because I expected to re-animate my dead-and-buried PhD. Also because I really needed a job. I did raise the question of my research and advocacy several times, during the interview and during the on-boarding, but no one really seemed to care, which I thought was odd. I worked a year in the London office. I was given to see a lot of great projects during that time -- pretty much anything cool or note worthy, I was there, often by accident. Happy to give more details, but I learnt that Facebook really value criticism -- I made friends with several people who were internally famous for working on or asking to Mark very tough questions (terrorism, suicides, pedophiles, political manipulation, etc.) and the intelligence, nuance and haste of the company surprised me; they eagerness to do good was immense, almost as much as how much in a hurry to fix things. They really wanted to understand what good was, and it generally wasn’t obvious: e.g. free speech is about letting pretty uncomfortable things fly, because you have to limit censorship to real harm. I left for many reasons, but the most obvious one was that the company hadn’t fully thought about the role of the London and my team had a lot of late meetings with Menlo Park, i.e. very late meetings, UK time -- leaving the office after midnight more often than not. I didn’t really engage for six months, but as soon as I knew that my previous director left (for the same reason) I lobbied my new company to hire him as CTO. He ended up hiring a dozen former Facebook engineers. The company I worked for then was one of the largest Facebook ad-buyer in London and we ended up being one of the first to test Workplace (at the same time as Slack). By then, I was more than used to the role of explaining how Facebook Ads worked, as many video game companies also spend a lot. I’ve been for literally more than 14 years been saying to anyone who care or not: What Facebook is trying to do is very precious, most of it seems anecdotic but they really allow connection in ways no one else can (basically the argument you see higher) but the company mechanically gains power in a way that you can’t prevent, so you want very strong regulations. I absolutely trust Mark to do the right thing; I’m scared that even smart politicians and civil servants don’t understand what’s at stake.

I submitted a PhD topic to my adviser in 2004: Social media didn’t really exist then, not without civil identity, but I saw some versions of it, and recognised there a different type of network effect than those described under that name in the economic literature or in two-sided markets. I submitted that this would require a different type of monopoly enforcement. I started in 2005, trying to combine epidemiology, AL Barabasi’s work on complex network and competition policy. Initially, it sounded like the worst idea anyone ever had. I gradually changed how I introduced my work to… well, the long paragraph that you just read to, in 2008, “Is Facebook a monopoly?” which generally triggered very long agressive rants on how the company was evil, even then. I didn’t defend in 2009 because my lab submitted (after the 2007 crisis that triggered a lot of soul-searching in economic science) that any defence should include actual data, not simulations -- and I didn’t have access to Facebook actual data. I tried to get access some sample of it anyway, like many academics; my trick was to use not quizz, like Kogan but casual games, like FarmVille. So I worked as a data scientist for a gaming studio (that ended up being sued by Zynga because their game was too derivative from FarmVille). The player social graph was unusable because massively skewed by players befriending each other to benefit from a ‘viral’ hack in the game. I gradually forgot about my ambition to be called “Dr.”. At the same time, I was very attentive but hardly active in both ethnographic research on social networks (Ellison, Steinfield, boyd, Dutton & al.) and the technical side, the OpenSocialWeb and related platformisation of the web. When many researchers and key developers joined Facebook, and go attacked violently for what seemed like a reasonable decisions; actually, as I saw so much attacks on a company that was started by teenagers who very rapidly learned and grew up, I ended up in the paradoxal position of defending against everyone the company that I was forecasting to be the dusk of the Nation-state. A few close friends had learnt how to leverage a social platform in 2003, on a previous iteration; they were power-users (tailored publication, messaging friends to read their update) and loved the power it gave them. They didn’t see a problem; but I did: they were working for anti-competition authority and I needed to convince them that people who hated Facebook were wrong-but-not-wrong. Somehow, that argument failed to convince. I remained a full-time analyst of the company, and was the highest-voted contributor on Quora on all related topics for a while. That was easy: most employees wouldn’t touch the topics. Fast-forward 2014, where I had pretty much moved on making a living out of my understanding of the company; video games were not fun (most project failed) and I got a call to interview there. I was very excited, mainly because I really wanted to talk to anyone there, at all, at this point. Also because I expected to re-animate my dead-and-buried PhD. Also because I really needed a job. I did raise the question of my research and advocacy several times, during the interview and during the on-boarding, but no one really seemed to care, which I thought was odd. I worked a year in the London office. I was given to see a lot of great projects during that time -- pretty much anything cool or note worthy, I was there, often by accident. Happy to give more details, but I learnt that Facebook really value criticism -- I made friends with several people who were internally famous for working on or asking to Mark very tough questions (terrorism, suicides, pedophiles, political manipulation, etc.) and the intelligence, nuance and haste of the company surprised me; they eagerness to do good was immense, almost as much as how much in a hurry to fix things. They really wanted to understand what good was, and it generally wasn’t obvious: e.g. free speech is about letting pretty uncomfortable things fly, because you have to limit censorship to real harm. I left for many reasons, but the most obvious one was that the company hadn’t fully thought about the role of the London and my team had a lot of late meetings with Menlo Park, i.e. very late meetings, UK time -- leaving the office after midnight more often than not. I didn’t really engage for six months, but as soon as I knew that my previous director left (for the same reason) I lobbied my new company to hire him as CTO. He ended up hiring a dozen former Facebook engineers. The company I worked for then was one of the largest Facebook ad-buyer in London and we ended up being one of the first to test Workplace (at the same time as Slack). By then, I was more than used to the role of explaining how Facebook Ads worked, as many video game companies also spend a lot. I’ve been for literally more than 14 years been saying to anyone who care or not: What Facebook is trying to do is very precious, most of it seems anecdotic but they really allow connection in ways no one else can (basically the argument you see higher) but the company mechanically gains power in a way that you can’t prevent, so you want very strong regulations. I absolutely trust Mark to do the right thing; I’m scared that even smart politicians and civil servants don’t understand what’s at stake.