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"Creative" people don't all have one type of motivation. I think people in the entertainment business don't usually have quite the same motivations that hacker

by pg 16y ago

"Creative" people don't all have one type of motivation. I think people in the entertainment business don't usually have quite the same motivations that hackers do. When people in the entertainment business make things, even when they have the purest motives, they do it to affect an audience. Whereas hackers often build things mainly for themselves, just to see if they'll work. Movies are messages. Hacks are not, necessarily. I think what Mark meant is that people in Hollywood would find it hard to imagine someone building something like Facebook just to see if it would work, rather than to have some effect on its audience, especially considering that one of Facebook's most distinctive features, at least now, is the enormous number of users it has.

boucher 16y ago
I think it's difficult to separate "see if it would work" from having "some effect on its audience" for something so completely focused on its audience. This isn't a hard disk driver, it's software built around the notion of real people interacting with each other. I also think in the context of starting a company around it, the motivation is absolutely to have an effect on your audience. After all, your moto is "make something people want" not simply "make something that works."
kenjackson 16y ago
But by the nature of a social networking site "seeing if it works" means "seeing if it affects in audience in a way to get them to join". I'm sure Mark wasn't interested in seeing if he could build the technical aspects of the site. Besides issues of scale and some of the newer programmatic layers, none of it seems like rocket science from the perspective of a developer. Unlike a hacking project to see if you can make free long distance calls... I think that Facebook is a lot more like the movie than what Woz used to do.
Alex3917 16y ago
"Movies are messages. Hacks are not." Maybe art films are messages, but most Hollywood films are all just following the same masturbatory formula to sell tickets by telling people what they want to hear. The goal is to glorify the complacency of the average American by selling them on the idea that they can get different results by doing the same thing. That's why just about every Hollywood film starts with the main character waking up one day and discovering that he's different than everyone else, and he has some sort of special destiny. No hard work required, you just have to recognize that one big opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime and take it, or whatever other bullshit. If anything hackers should learn from Hollywood and use the same toolkit to market their startups. Apple does it extremely well, but rarely do I see startups doing a good job at it.
reitzensteinm 16y ago
In my experience as a game developer at least, the best entertainers absolutely would play around with ideas and work on projects for their own gratification. And on the other hand, Facebook succeeding or not is by definition it having an effect on its audience - if people like it enough to keep using it, it'll work. So if anything it's probably more like making a movie than a technical hack. I think you're drawing a distinction in motivations (audience/no audience) that doesn't really fit. If we're talking about the best of both industries, I think they both work on each type of project.
itistoday 16y ago
These sorts of careless generalizations are just that, careless, and generalizations. They don't help much, except to spark arguments and debate. I think Mark should have stopped at, "They got X wrong", instead of presuming to know what "Hollywood" does or does not understand.
- bloomshed 16y ago
  I feel like Zuckerberg is understandably defensive about the way he was portrayed in the movie. It would freak anyone out to see their character faults displayed and magnified and exploited to drive much of the dramatic content in a full length feature film. The Newark donation, the response in the interviews, it all comes off as defensive to me. Zuckerberg is a lot of great things but in my opinion he's not entirely aware of how his actions are perceived by others. By that I mean he doesn't seem honest. He says he came out to Stanford in the summer "just to hang out." Why can't he say, "I wanted to build facebook and they have great programmers out here. The weather also kicks ass."? It's hard to believe him sometimes.
danilocampos 16y ago
There's one wrinkle I see here, speaking as an Aaron Sorkin fanboy. There's a lot Sorkin does that just shouldn't work. His dialogue is extremely lengthy and, in the case of The West Wing and Sports Night, he completely threw out the idea of using internal (team) conflict to drive the narrative, choosing unity instead. His President of the United States was extraordinarily idealistic and principled, even under fire. This is a long way of saying I think Sorkin does it this way to amuse himself. He creates things he, himself, would like. He certainly feels an obligation to his audience, as the parent comment mentioned, but overall he writes the characters and dialogue in a way that gives him pleasure. edit: Even going so far as to inject the idea of taking pleasure from writing things well into his scribe characters: Danny and Casey in Sports Night, Toby, Sam, President Bartlet and Will on the West Wing.
- sliverstorm 16y ago
  I wouldn't chalk all of The West Wing's success with an unusual recipe up to Sorkin. Martin Sheen, IMHO, does an amazing job in his role, which (also IMHO) is pivotal to the recipe, and I can't imagine any other actor pulling it off so well.
- radley 16y ago
  I'm also a Sorkin / WW fanboy and would add: 1) The movie isn't for y'all (i.e. SV programmers) - it's for everyone else. How Raiders of the Lost Ark is Spielberg's action-adventure archeology, The Social Network is a Sorkin-banter exercise. 2) Sorkin enjoys writing for intellectual ideology, which is very difficult to position in any form of entertainment. In a way, he's forced to choose personas capable of centering his complex dialog, be it the President of the United States or a 20-something self-made billionaire.
- bloomshed 16y ago
  Could the argument be made that Sorkin's style filled a void in the marketplace that was network TV drama in the case of West Wing? Long, tight, terse dialogue is what the audience interacted with most immediately with West Wing. Sorkin can write, so he does. I would say audiences who appreciated good writing and a different conflict arc to drive the narrative had few other alternatives for that time slot.
tghw 16y ago
Both you and Mark need to get off your high horses. You don't build Facebook for yourself, you build it for an audience. Otherwise, it's not Facebook. Likewise, most people who love making movies do it because they love making it. A lot of those movies never get audiences. Just like a lot of software projects never see the light of day. But some do.
davidcann 16y ago
The few writers in Hollywood that I know will write 50 stories for every one that gets made into a movie/short/etc. Many stories are written down just as experiments or to get an idea out of the system... very similar to how I work as a code hacker. There are, of course, uncreative money-grubbing people in Hollywood... just like in the tech world.

by pg 16y ago

boucher 16y ago

I think it's difficult to separate "see if it would work" from having "some effect on its audience" for something so completely focused on its audience. This isn't a hard disk driver, it's software built around the notion of real people interacting with each other. I also think in the context of starting a company around it, the motivation is absolutely to have an effect on your audience. After all, your moto is "make something people want" not simply "make something that works."

kenjackson 16y ago

But by the nature of a social networking site "seeing if it works" means "seeing if it affects in audience in a way to get them to join". I'm sure Mark wasn't interested in seeing if he could build the technical aspects of the site. Besides issues of scale and some of the newer programmatic layers, none of it seems like rocket science from the perspective of a developer. Unlike a hacking project to see if you can make free long distance calls... I think that Facebook is a lot more like the movie than what Woz used to do.

Alex3917 16y ago

"Movies are messages. Hacks are not." Maybe art films are messages, but most Hollywood films are all just following the same masturbatory formula to sell tickets by telling people what they want to hear. The goal is to glorify the complacency of the average American by selling them on the idea that they can get different results by doing the same thing. That's why just about every Hollywood film starts with the main character waking up one day and discovering that he's different than everyone else, and he has some sort of special destiny. No hard work required, you just have to recognize that one big opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime and take it, or whatever other bullshit. If anything hackers should learn from Hollywood and use the same toolkit to market their startups. Apple does it extremely well, but rarely do I see startups doing a good job at it.

reitzensteinm 16y ago

In my experience as a game developer at least, the best entertainers absolutely would play around with ideas and work on projects for their own gratification. And on the other hand, Facebook succeeding or not is by definition it having an effect on its audience - if people like it enough to keep using it, it'll work. So if anything it's probably more like making a movie than a technical hack. I think you're drawing a distinction in motivations (audience/no audience) that doesn't really fit. If we're talking about the best of both industries, I think they both work on each type of project.

itistoday 16y ago

These sorts of careless generalizations are just that, careless, and generalizations. They don't help much, except to spark arguments and debate. I think Mark should have stopped at, "They got X wrong", instead of presuming to know what "Hollywood" does or does not understand.

bloomshed 16y ago
I feel like Zuckerberg is understandably defensive about the way he was portrayed in the movie. It would freak anyone out to see their character faults displayed and magnified and exploited to drive much of the dramatic content in a full length feature film. The Newark donation, the response in the interviews, it all comes off as defensive to me. Zuckerberg is a lot of great things but in my opinion he's not entirely aware of how his actions are perceived by others. By that I mean he doesn't seem honest. He says he came out to Stanford in the summer "just to hang out." Why can't he say, "I wanted to build facebook and they have great programmers out here. The weather also kicks ass."? It's hard to believe him sometimes.

danilocampos 16y ago

There's one wrinkle I see here, speaking as an Aaron Sorkin fanboy. There's a lot Sorkin does that just shouldn't work. His dialogue is extremely lengthy and, in the case of The West Wing and Sports Night, he completely threw out the idea of using internal (team) conflict to drive the narrative, choosing unity instead. His President of the United States was extraordinarily idealistic and principled, even under fire. This is a long way of saying I think Sorkin does it this way to amuse himself. He creates things he, himself, would like. He certainly feels an obligation to his audience, as the parent comment mentioned, but overall he writes the characters and dialogue in a way that gives him pleasure. edit: Even going so far as to inject the idea of taking pleasure from writing things well into his scribe characters: Danny and Casey in Sports Night, Toby, Sam, President Bartlet and Will on the West Wing.

sliverstorm 16y ago
I wouldn't chalk all of The West Wing's success with an unusual recipe up to Sorkin. Martin Sheen, IMHO, does an amazing job in his role, which (also IMHO) is pivotal to the recipe, and I can't imagine any other actor pulling it off so well.
radley 16y ago
I'm also a Sorkin / WW fanboy and would add: 1) The movie isn't for y'all (i.e. SV programmers) - it's for everyone else. How Raiders of the Lost Ark is Spielberg's action-adventure archeology, The Social Network is a Sorkin-banter exercise. 2) Sorkin enjoys writing for intellectual ideology, which is very difficult to position in any form of entertainment. In a way, he's forced to choose personas capable of centering his complex dialog, be it the President of the United States or a 20-something self-made billionaire.
bloomshed 16y ago
Could the argument be made that Sorkin's style filled a void in the marketplace that was network TV drama in the case of West Wing? Long, tight, terse dialogue is what the audience interacted with most immediately with West Wing. Sorkin can write, so he does. I would say audiences who appreciated good writing and a different conflict arc to drive the narrative had few other alternatives for that time slot.

tghw 16y ago

Both you and Mark need to get off your high horses. You don't build Facebook for yourself, you build it for an audience. Otherwise, it's not Facebook. Likewise, most people who love making movies do it because they love making it. A lot of those movies never get audiences. Just like a lot of software projects never see the light of day. But some do.

davidcann 16y ago

The few writers in Hollywood that I know will write 50 stories for every one that gets made into a movie/short/etc. Many stories are written down just as experiments or to get an idea out of the system... very similar to how I work as a code hacker. There are, of course, uncreative money-grubbing people in Hollywood... just like in the tech world.