9 ms·

Walt Mossberg Quits Facebook

139 points by adrianhon 8y ago

mindgam3 8y ago
“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.
- adrianhon 8y ago
  He wrote that as a final message to his followers on Facebook. Seems reasonable. You can see the full message here: https://www.facebook.com/waltmossberg1/posts/10161060096925063 https://www.facebook.com/waltmossberg1/posts/101610600969250...
- finaliteration 8y ago
  I’m not totally clear on how his posting on Facebook invalidates his message (assuming that’s the argument being made by posting this comment). Facebook is, for better or worse, one of the best ways to get a message out to many people, especially if they are friends or followers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone sees it.
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    Apologies if it was unclear. My intent in posting his message was to summarize the article and because I personally found it concise and inspiring. I do not think it is unreasonable at all for him to have posted it there. In fact I think it’s a powerful statement.
    - finaliteration 8y ago
      Makes sense. Sorry for the confusion on my part.
      - mindgam3 8y ago
        No worries. HN is a tough crowd and sincerity or sarcasm can be hard to interpret over text. I have seen people using /s to reduce confusion here and I try to follow that convention when I can’t resist revealing my jaded and cynical side.
  - diminoten 8y ago
    I think we can talk about this in a non-gotcha sense, so for what it's worth, it is interesting that he felt the best way to reach his audience with this message was the platform he's leaving. If he had a better way of reaching his audience, why not use that instead?
    - ska 8y ago
      Because this is the best way to reach people who wouldn't see it any other way? If some subset of your friends/connections are only reachable by Facebook, they are the ones you are going to disconnect with by doing this. Makes sense to me.
      - diminoten 8y ago
        Well yes, but it's interesting, to me anyway, that Facebook is that platform for him, the platform where he can connect with the biggest number of his audience.
        philipov 8y ago
        But this is obvious, otherwise leaving Facebook wouldn't be noteworthy at all. That's ultimately why he's on Facebook in the first place. If Facebook were ineffective at providing people with network effects, it would not be necessary to get people to leave it.
        ska 8y ago
        It holds even if it isn’t the biggest number. It could be a small number, but how else would you reach them?
        diminoten 8y ago
        If Facebook is the only way to reach your audience, maybe don't quit it? It clearly isn't here, so his post would have made more sense outside of Facebook.
    - nathan_long 8y ago
  - tivert 8y ago
    > I don’t think it’s unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone sees it. Especially if an important part of that message is to disseminate a forwarding address.
- blueboo 8y ago
  Oh dear. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
  - mindgam3 8y ago
    I believe you are misinterpreting my point as discussed in another previous reply. To be clear, I am not calling “gotcha” on Walt Mossberg, I am supporting his statement.
- miles 8y ago
  The confusion around this comment may have been avoided by putting double quotes around the whole thing (since it is lifted verbatim from the article) and single quotes around Mossberg's statement. Or even just prepending a right angle bracket (>) at the beginning of the quote. Surrounding the text with asterisks to italicize it is also an option, but may be less recognizable. I must admit to also having read the comment as being in the spirit of Mister Gotcha, cited by bluboo below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708394
- michaelcampbell 8y ago
  Yes, that is, in fact, a fact.
mikestew 8y ago
If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all have our own breaking point. I especially appreciate the non-hysterical tone of the message, rather than the too-common table-wiping rant.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all have our own breaking point My personal breaking point is coming. In the early days, I would post on Facebook a couple of times an hour. It's become less and less as Facebook became more and more obnoxious, both on the front end and the back end. Today, I'm down to using Facebook only on weekends. And even then sometimes it's only on one of those days. Facebook has made it easy for me to not care about it anymore.
  - qubex 8y ago
    I was an avid Facebook user in the earlier years (2008-2010), and a regular several-times-a-day checker from 2010 until early 2017. I griped often about how it had become ”boring”, full of random looking stuff interspersed with occasional nuggets I was really interested in. I tried to write a filter to strip out the boring stuff and failed, and it hit me that they were deliberate and optimal in their mixture of crap and good to keep me just within my tolerance level. I turned off notifications on my iDevices in late April and have checked it occasionally whenever I feel like it. I might look at it two or three times a week. I can’t quite bring myself to abandon it (because it serves a useful purpose in terms of communication and keeping up with far-flung friends and family) but on the whole it’s pretty useless and obnoxious on a daily basis. They overextended themselves by a wide margin. They went a Like too far. ;)
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
People that work at Facebook here, does it make you uncomfortable about the future, and make you question what you are doing, when things like this happen?
- gk1 8y ago
  If they're not already discomforted by all that's happened, I would not expect this (relatively) minor event to make a difference.
- kkhire 8y ago
  fb's revenue is fine and their products have become fundamental parts of the internet, esp for people 40+ and in 3rd world countries.
- jens4 8y ago
  No because the issues are not just Facebook issues or technical issues. What is happening involves society as a whole. And society does not have perfect systems and even known solutions in place to handle this stuff. There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary. But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff? There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less. Read Walt Mossberg's own columns after Obama got elected in 2008 about the promise of social media. That hasn't changed. My mother has cancer and her biggest support system day to day is a group on Facebook. So I know personally what value a well functioning social network can create. How it can contribute to well being. The good stuff happening is not going away.
abakker 8y ago
At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good, and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails. I know that it is not necessary, but it is convenient. Additionally, its support for multimedia posts, links, profiles and other adds a nice, rich experience. Unfortunately, many of the internet's great consumer businesses were built on this premise that advertising will pay for everything. That premise has been a good one for many years now, but, advertisers are getting savvier, and the addressable market is getting addressed pretty well. yes, there is room for growth, but, for many advertisers, that growth is not inside their target markets. While targeted marketing does provide value, I think it is an open question "how targeted is enough targeted?" Meaning that there is not definitive and universal data on where the benefits of less privacy really result in positive outcomes for advertisers. I would guess that in many cases greater accuracy in audience targeting does not result in statistically significant improvements in conversions when balanced against the increased cost of hyper targeted vs semi targeted ads. I am sure this depends heavily on many factors. The challenge, though, is that facebook has to grow revenue, and, they have pursued this with advertisers by attempting to differentiate their ad products on the basis of hyper targeting. they do have differentiated ability to do this, and it gives them a competitive edge. It means that they spend the majority of their time building products that the liminal areas around personal privacy and ethics. This puts them in a very difficult spot, because many of their competitors in the ad business are doing the same thing, and trying to get the same level of detail. Google has not launched multiple social networks just for the fun of it...they did it to serve their customers. The monetization and differentiation that facebook has pursued has pushed them to be on the bleeding edge of selling granular, user-specific data. This seems unlikely to change without an outside force to force a change of behavior in their competitors as well. If you take away the competitive pressure to do something (by making it illegal, for example) then it can avoid further progress in this arms race.
- josefresco 8y ago
  > and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails This, was a problem?
simplecomplex 8y ago
Values? I understand not using Facebook because it’s annoying and filled with ads... but what values is one upholding when they quit Facebook because they show ads? That advertising is evil? I don’t watch TV because it sucks and is filled with ads, in other words it’s not worth it. But I don’t pretend that is some kind of moral victory.
- gk1 8y ago
  You're conflating privacy violations with advertising.
catacombs 8y ago
Breaking: Old, white man quits Facebook.
yeuxverte 8y ago
Have we really gotten to the point where "some dude quit Facebook" is considered news? The fact that the NYT has degenerated to this is disappointing. While there are certainly fair criticisms of Facebook, this trigger friendly news coverage of the company is becoming outrageous and is detracting from any previous viable points.
- tshannon 8y ago
  Well, when some dude is a veteran tech journalist whose access to information and networks may depend on him having a facebook account, I'd say it's interesting enough to be newsworthy (although maybe not new york times newsworthy), in my opinion. I may be misunderstanding your claim that it's "detracting from any previous viable points". What points are you referring to that this detracts from?
  - aylmao 8y ago
    I don't think it detracts from previous viable points like OP, but I do think the headline might at first trigger an eye-roll on a lot of readers. It sounds like an irrelevant piece of trivia that the NYT wants to blow up in an attempt to just keep throwing mud at Facebook. If one reads the article there's a few interesting points-- it includes some statements by Mossberg and info on his book which will probably include some thoughts on Facebook. I try to at least skim stories before commenting on them which is the only reason I opened this one. The title reads like cheap celebrity journalism. Something more fleshed-out, like an interview going in depth about his thoughts on Facebook and tech's impact as a whole, leading to his book, would've been more "NYT worthy" IMO. And a better title.
  - porpoisely 8y ago
    Do you know if the NYTimes wrote an article when mossberg opened his facebook account? If mossberg opening a facebook account isn't news, neither is his closing of his account. Also, mossberg is a journalist. I was under the impression that journalists being the news themselves is bad journalism. Isn't that why most journalists go out of their way to not to be part of a story? If rupert murdoch, in his war with facebook, pressured mossberg to close his account, that would be news. Otherwise, this is just the nytimes and a journalist creating news, not reporting on news.
classichasclass 8y ago
Nit: the TRS-80 Model 100 didn't come out until 1983. I realize the NYT is just quoting the Verge article where the original error is, but portable computers like that were merely a dream in 1977.
chrissam 8y ago
He probably quit Facebook due to Facebook being constantly defamed in the media - and now the media is reporting on him leaving. It's like that Jake Gyllenhaal movie where he starts off as an ambulance chasing freelance reporter and ends up causing crimes so he can film them.
- CPLX 8y ago
  He literally is the media. What’s wrong with the idea that that he observed something, made a decision, and then acted on it? Or is he presumed to have no agency?
  - chrissam 8y ago
    Maybe you're right - maybe Facebook is doing all this bad stuff and Walt Mossberg happened to notice and decided to follow through. But I'm skeptical - I think the more traditional news media (aka the folks who write stories and collect facts) tends to view news aggregators as a threat to their business model. I think the idea that Facebook ought to be required to screen whatever news it aggregates for "truthfulness" is absurd and I (sometimes) think that the constant refrain of "Facebook did X Bad Thing" is closer to activism than journalism. But I could be wrong - I'm not as certain as my first post indicated.
    - asdff 8y ago
      I don't think news media outlets are very concerned about social networks anymore; NYT is on literally every app in everyone's pocket, whereas before it was just in the hands of their direct subscribers and sales.
- jamespitts 8y ago
  Board members have a different level of culpability than the management at the firms which they help govern, due to the kinds of decisions they are commissioned to make and the information they have access to. Board members may also find themselves misled by management. As part of the governance process, Walt Mossberg does bear a certain amount of responsibility for what Facebook management has allowed to happen on their network, and I interpret his action here is part of his taking that responsibility.
russdpale 8y ago
Remember when facebook first came out, and we laughed at people with AOL accounts? Now its facebook in aol's old position, laughable.
pasbesoin 8y ago
I remember when and after a friend twisted my arm to join, my reluctance in part due to having read how the young(er) Zuckerberg treated his nascent online property and his classmates. Well, I considered, perhaps people can improve. And, it's not just him anymore, it's an institution that and whose people will establish and enforce more acceptable, accountable norms. Not so much, I guess. Shame on me, for overriding my intuition.
- tracker1 8y ago
  One has to strike a bit of a balance. I wouldn't want them to be as heavy handed as YouTube, by contrast.
tlynchpin 8y ago
gotta rep Tru Thoughts, I'm listening to the latest Unfold [0] and reading here about dear Walt, selector dishes up this gem: Homeboy Sandman & Edan - #NeverUseTheInternetAgain (Stones Throw) life imitates art! [0] https://www.mixcloud.com/truthoughts/tru-thoughts-presents-unfold-161218-with-miink-flowdan-and-sampology/ https://www.mixcloud.com/truthoughts/tru-thoughts-presents-u...
zmonkeyz 8y ago
Old man yells at cloud...

139 points by adrianhon 8y ago

“I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here,” he wrote on Facebook.

adrianhon 8y ago
He wrote that as a final message to his followers on Facebook. Seems reasonable. You can see the full message here: https://www.facebook.com/waltmossberg1/posts/10161060096925063 https://www.facebook.com/waltmossberg1/posts/101610600969250...
finaliteration 8y ago
I’m not totally clear on how his posting on Facebook invalidates his message (assuming that’s the argument being made by posting this comment). Facebook is, for better or worse, one of the best ways to get a message out to many people, especially if they are friends or followers. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone sees it.
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Apologies if it was unclear. My intent in posting his message was to summarize the article and because I personally found it concise and inspiring. I do not think it is unreasonable at all for him to have posted it there. In fact I think it’s a powerful statement.
  - finaliteration 8y ago
    Makes sense. Sorry for the confusion on my part.
    - mindgam3 8y ago
      No worries. HN is a tough crowd and sincerity or sarcasm can be hard to interpret over text. I have seen people using /s to reduce confusion here and I try to follow that convention when I can’t resist revealing my jaded and cynical side.
- diminoten 8y ago
  I think we can talk about this in a non-gotcha sense, so for what it's worth, it is interesting that he felt the best way to reach his audience with this message was the platform he's leaving. If he had a better way of reaching his audience, why not use that instead?
  - ska 8y ago
    Because this is the best way to reach people who wouldn't see it any other way? If some subset of your friends/connections are only reachable by Facebook, they are the ones you are going to disconnect with by doing this. Makes sense to me.
    - diminoten 8y ago
      Well yes, but it's interesting, to me anyway, that Facebook is that platform for him, the platform where he can connect with the biggest number of his audience.
      - philipov 8y ago
        But this is obvious, otherwise leaving Facebook wouldn't be noteworthy at all. That's ultimately why he's on Facebook in the first place. If Facebook were ineffective at providing people with network effects, it would not be necessary to get people to leave it.
      - ska 8y ago
        It holds even if it isn’t the biggest number. It could be a small number, but how else would you reach them?
        diminoten 8y ago
        If Facebook is the only way to reach your audience, maybe don't quit it? It clearly isn't here, so his post would have made more sense outside of Facebook.
  - nathan_long 8y ago
- tivert 8y ago
  > I don’t think it’s unreasonable to post a final “I’m leaving Facebook” message there so everyone sees it. Especially if an important part of that message is to disseminate a forwarding address.
blueboo 8y ago
Oh dear. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha
- mindgam3 8y ago
  I believe you are misinterpreting my point as discussed in another previous reply. To be clear, I am not calling “gotcha” on Walt Mossberg, I am supporting his statement.
miles 8y ago
The confusion around this comment may have been avoided by putting double quotes around the whole thing (since it is lifted verbatim from the article) and single quotes around Mossberg's statement. Or even just prepending a right angle bracket (>) at the beginning of the quote. Surrounding the text with asterisks to italicize it is also an option, but may be less recognizable. I must admit to also having read the comment as being in the spirit of Mister Gotcha, cited by bluboo below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18708394
michaelcampbell 8y ago
Yes, that is, in fact, a fact.

mikestew 8y ago

If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all have our own breaking point. I especially appreciate the non-hysterical tone of the message, rather than the too-common table-wiping rant.

reaperducer 8y ago
If it's out of principal, I'm surprised it took him this long, but hey, we all have our own breaking point My personal breaking point is coming. In the early days, I would post on Facebook a couple of times an hour. It's become less and less as Facebook became more and more obnoxious, both on the front end and the back end. Today, I'm down to using Facebook only on weekends. And even then sometimes it's only on one of those days. Facebook has made it easy for me to not care about it anymore.
- qubex 8y ago
  I was an avid Facebook user in the earlier years (2008-2010), and a regular several-times-a-day checker from 2010 until early 2017. I griped often about how it had become ”boring”, full of random looking stuff interspersed with occasional nuggets I was really interested in. I tried to write a filter to strip out the boring stuff and failed, and it hit me that they were deliberate and optimal in their mixture of crap and good to keep me just within my tolerance level. I turned off notifications on my iDevices in late April and have checked it occasionally whenever I feel like it. I might look at it two or three times a week. I can’t quite bring myself to abandon it (because it serves a useful purpose in terms of communication and keeping up with far-flung friends and family) but on the whole it’s pretty useless and obnoxious on a daily basis. They overextended themselves by a wide margin. They went a Like too far. ;)

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago

People that work at Facebook here, does it make you uncomfortable about the future, and make you question what you are doing, when things like this happen?

gk1 8y ago
If they're not already discomforted by all that's happened, I would not expect this (relatively) minor event to make a difference.
kkhire 8y ago
fb's revenue is fine and their products have become fundamental parts of the internet, esp for people 40+ and in 3rd world countries.
jens4 8y ago
No because the issues are not just Facebook issues or technical issues. What is happening involves society as a whole. And society does not have perfect systems and even known solutions in place to handle this stuff. There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary. But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff? There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less. Read Walt Mossberg's own columns after Obama got elected in 2008 about the promise of social media. That hasn't changed. My mother has cancer and her biggest support system day to day is a group on Facebook. So I know personally what value a well functioning social network can create. How it can contribute to well being. The good stuff happening is not going away.

abakker 8y ago

At its core, facebook contains a useful service. It's messaging capabilities are good, and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails. I know that it is not necessary, but it is convenient. Additionally, its support for multimedia posts, links, profiles and other adds a nice, rich experience. Unfortunately, many of the internet's great consumer businesses were built on this premise that advertising will pay for everything. That premise has been a good one for many years now, but, advertisers are getting savvier, and the addressable market is getting addressed pretty well. yes, there is room for growth, but, for many advertisers, that growth is not inside their target markets. While targeted marketing does provide value, I think it is an open question "how targeted is enough targeted?" Meaning that there is not definitive and universal data on where the benefits of less privacy really result in positive outcomes for advertisers. I would guess that in many cases greater accuracy in audience targeting does not result in statistically significant improvements in conversions when balanced against the increased cost of hyper targeted vs semi targeted ads. I am sure this depends heavily on many factors. The challenge, though, is that facebook has to grow revenue, and, they have pursued this with advertisers by attempting to differentiate their ad products on the basis of hyper targeting. they do have differentiated ability to do this, and it gives them a competitive edge. It means that they spend the majority of their time building products that the liminal areas around personal privacy and ethics. This puts them in a very difficult spot, because many of their competitors in the ad business are doing the same thing, and trying to get the same level of detail. Google has not launched multiple social networks just for the fun of it...they did it to serve their customers. The monetization and differentiation that facebook has pursued has pushed them to be on the bleeding edge of selling granular, user-specific data. This seems unlikely to change without an outside force to force a change of behavior in their competitors as well. If you take away the competitive pressure to do something (by making it illegal, for example) then it can avoid further progress in this arms race.

josefresco 8y ago
> and the fact that identities and connections facebook are persistent effectively combats the problem that plagued much of the early internet: constantly changing pseudonyms and emails This, was a problem?

simplecomplex 8y ago

Values? I understand not using Facebook because it’s annoying and filled with ads... but what values is one upholding when they quit Facebook because they show ads? That advertising is evil? I don’t watch TV because it sucks and is filled with ads, in other words it’s not worth it. But I don’t pretend that is some kind of moral victory.

gk1 8y ago
You're conflating privacy violations with advertising.

catacombs 8y ago

Breaking: Old, white man quits Facebook.

yeuxverte 8y ago

Have we really gotten to the point where "some dude quit Facebook" is considered news? The fact that the NYT has degenerated to this is disappointing. While there are certainly fair criticisms of Facebook, this trigger friendly news coverage of the company is becoming outrageous and is detracting from any previous viable points.

tshannon 8y ago
Well, when some dude is a veteran tech journalist whose access to information and networks may depend on him having a facebook account, I'd say it's interesting enough to be newsworthy (although maybe not new york times newsworthy), in my opinion. I may be misunderstanding your claim that it's "detracting from any previous viable points". What points are you referring to that this detracts from?
- aylmao 8y ago
  I don't think it detracts from previous viable points like OP, but I do think the headline might at first trigger an eye-roll on a lot of readers. It sounds like an irrelevant piece of trivia that the NYT wants to blow up in an attempt to just keep throwing mud at Facebook. If one reads the article there's a few interesting points-- it includes some statements by Mossberg and info on his book which will probably include some thoughts on Facebook. I try to at least skim stories before commenting on them which is the only reason I opened this one. The title reads like cheap celebrity journalism. Something more fleshed-out, like an interview going in depth about his thoughts on Facebook and tech's impact as a whole, leading to his book, would've been more "NYT worthy" IMO. And a better title.
- porpoisely 8y ago
  Do you know if the NYTimes wrote an article when mossberg opened his facebook account? If mossberg opening a facebook account isn't news, neither is his closing of his account. Also, mossberg is a journalist. I was under the impression that journalists being the news themselves is bad journalism. Isn't that why most journalists go out of their way to not to be part of a story? If rupert murdoch, in his war with facebook, pressured mossberg to close his account, that would be news. Otherwise, this is just the nytimes and a journalist creating news, not reporting on news.

classichasclass 8y ago

Nit: the TRS-80 Model 100 didn't come out until 1983. I realize the NYT is just quoting the Verge article where the original error is, but portable computers like that were merely a dream in 1977.

chrissam 8y ago

He probably quit Facebook due to Facebook being constantly defamed in the media - and now the media is reporting on him leaving. It's like that Jake Gyllenhaal movie where he starts off as an ambulance chasing freelance reporter and ends up causing crimes so he can film them.

CPLX 8y ago
He literally is the media. What’s wrong with the idea that that he observed something, made a decision, and then acted on it? Or is he presumed to have no agency?
- chrissam 8y ago
  Maybe you're right - maybe Facebook is doing all this bad stuff and Walt Mossberg happened to notice and decided to follow through. But I'm skeptical - I think the more traditional news media (aka the folks who write stories and collect facts) tends to view news aggregators as a threat to their business model. I think the idea that Facebook ought to be required to screen whatever news it aggregates for "truthfulness" is absurd and I (sometimes) think that the constant refrain of "Facebook did X Bad Thing" is closer to activism than journalism. But I could be wrong - I'm not as certain as my first post indicated.
  - asdff 8y ago
    I don't think news media outlets are very concerned about social networks anymore; NYT is on literally every app in everyone's pocket, whereas before it was just in the hands of their direct subscribers and sales.
jamespitts 8y ago
Board members have a different level of culpability than the management at the firms which they help govern, due to the kinds of decisions they are commissioned to make and the information they have access to. Board members may also find themselves misled by management. As part of the governance process, Walt Mossberg does bear a certain amount of responsibility for what Facebook management has allowed to happen on their network, and I interpret his action here is part of his taking that responsibility.

russdpale 8y ago

Remember when facebook first came out, and we laughed at people with AOL accounts? Now its facebook in aol's old position, laughable.

pasbesoin 8y ago

I remember when and after a friend twisted my arm to join, my reluctance in part due to having read how the young(er) Zuckerberg treated his nascent online property and his classmates. Well, I considered, perhaps people can improve. And, it's not just him anymore, it's an institution that and whose people will establish and enforce more acceptable, accountable norms. Not so much, I guess. Shame on me, for overriding my intuition.

tracker1 8y ago
One has to strike a bit of a balance. I wouldn't want them to be as heavy handed as YouTube, by contrast.

tlynchpin 8y ago

gotta rep Tru Thoughts, I'm listening to the latest Unfold [0] and reading here about dear Walt, selector dishes up this gem: Homeboy Sandman & Edan - #NeverUseTheInternetAgain (Stones Throw) life imitates art! [0] https://www.mixcloud.com/truthoughts/tru-thoughts-presents-unfold-161218-with-miink-flowdan-and-sampology/ https://www.mixcloud.com/truthoughts/tru-thoughts-presents-u...

zmonkeyz 8y ago

Old man yells at cloud...