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My experience tells me that FB has been better off in the long term having Mark's dictatorship than having to deal with a horde of short term investors that wan

My experience tells me that FB has been better off in the long term having Mark's dictatorship than having to deal with a horde of short term investors that wanted a way to make quickly a return even if it meant burning users down. See also: "Here’s an unpopular opinion: We’re lucky Mark Zuckerberg is in charge" ( https://medium.com/swlh/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-stock-drop-shouldnt-step-down-a4277737152e https://medium.com/swlh/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-stock-drop-... )

mrweasel 8y ago
I think you're right. If we think that Zuckerbergs decisions where bad, in terms of user privacy, just wait until impatient shareholders are in charge. In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point.
- soup10 8y ago
  They would be in much worse shape if they hadn't acquired Instagram at a good price.
  - bartread 8y ago
    Quite possibly, but wasn't it Mark Zuckerberg who thought that acquisition was a good idea?
    - soup10 8y ago
      True but its a bit of a problem when your hegemony keeps getting threatened by the latest flavor of the month social network and quarter after quarter your getting pressured by shareholders to keep increasing advertising revenue.
      - zitterbewegung 8y ago
        Buying a company out is much cheaper than it disrupting you .
        soup10 8y ago
        true but future companies are under no obligation to sell and as facebook's reputation goes down the gutter i would say are even not likely
        zitterbewegung 8y ago
        The future companies that don’t accept buy outs and are successful are obviously the ones who will beat you .
        rdlecler1 8y ago
        SnapChat?
        shrisukhani 8y ago
        True but future companies’ decisions to sell will in almost all cases not be based on FB’s reputation - even if it goes down the gutter - than the material terms of the acquisition. And as for those that don’t get acquired, I think we can all take a quick look at Snap’s market performance and bleeding execs. That’s not to say that FB will not be disrupted - everyone eventually is. Just that it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the near future.
- bartread 8y ago
  Tend to agree. I'm no fan of either Facebook or Zuckerberg. My attempts to leave it all behind have thus far proven unsuccessful, and the fact that FB owns both WhatsApp and Instagram doesn't help. Still, I'm almost shocked by how viscerally unsympathetic I feel towards these shareholders. I genuinely believe their stewardship would be worse for both Facebook and its users: they'd mismanage Facebook into the ground and, along the way, would utterly compromise users in increasingly desperate attempts to turn things around.
  - nullc 8y ago
    If they burn facebook to the ground this may be better in the long run both for the users and for society at large.
    - confiscate 8y ago
      I disagree. That would feel like going back to the year 1999
      - gameswithgo 8y ago
        are you for real? i don’t understand why anyone has trouble leaving. there has been a huge brain drain it isn’t a good place now.
        torqueTorrent 8y ago
        >> don’t understand why anyone has trouble leaving I also find it puzzling. Then again, as with cults or other bottom feeding fads and the increasingly ubiquitous, various and sundry addictive mires and dark patterns, to avoid the trouble in leaving, it is best not to enroll in the first place.
        bartread 8y ago
        Sure: most social activities are arranged on either Facebook or WhatsApp. I tried going without but it's quite inconvenient.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Do you also see him as the sole cause of the company's problems?
  - rock_hard 8y ago
    The companies problems are mostly societal problems...their fates are tied though
    - rhizome 8y ago
      That's cool that he gets credit for all the good stuff while blaming society for everything bad that happens.
      - meowface 8y ago
        Or you could say he gets credit for all the bad stuff when society is often to blame, and not much credit for the good stuff. That seems to be the most common response from everyone, including the tech community. I think businesses whose primary source of income is advertising to their users can't really avoid being unethical. Facebook is just one of the biggest case studies of that model. The business model is rotten from the core, but I don't think it's Zuck's fault. Any other CEO would also have to grapple with that in a way that will inevitably hurt users and help advertisers. If I were Zuck I would maybe consider trying to start a new tech company with a completely different business model. "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." aside, I don't really think he's a bad guy. No worse than Schmidt or Dorsey etc., at least.
      - shrisukhani 8y ago
        He doesn’t get credit for all the good stuff and always makes it a point to more-than-generously _attribute_(not share) the credit to the leaders within FB responsible for that stuff.
- Aunche 8y ago
  > In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point. Him and Sheryl Sandberg.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    I think Sandberg may be part of the problem at FB. I do concede, despite my FB hate, that having Zuck is about 15 thousand times better than having shareholders in charge over there.
  - armitron 8y ago
    Sandberg is a major liability and should be gotten rid of ASAP. Mark has a vision and has made some good choices, prescient moves and (most importantly) great long-term bets but Sandberg looks to me like a career opportunist, completely out of touch with technology.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      What are you talking about? If you know anything about the history of Facebook as an entity, you'll recognize her contributions to the business. Facebook wouldn't be the juggernaut it is today without her. She is extremely effective and perhaps one of the best technology executives in recent history.
- headsoup 8y ago
  I'm not sure it's clear that the shareholders are the driving force of short term greed or just an excuse for businesses to do so. After all businesses set their guidance and a lot of shareholders would probably prefer medium-long term returns, aside the speculators.
- dao- 8y ago
  > In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point. Then again, maybe societies would be better off if Facebook crashed and burned.
- kjar 8y ago
  Let it crash
staticautomatic 8y ago
I find Zuckerberg's decisions largely indistinguishable from what I'd expect of an investor demanding short terms gains over long term vision and sustainability.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  Buying IG and Whatsapp doesn’t seem to be in line with what investors would do, is it? Especially the latter. The treatment of Messenger and Whatsapp as well.
- ChrisCinelli 8y ago
  For sure Mark has made a bunch of decisions looking at the short term gain in his life. But he also did not see or largely underestimated the long term repercussions. We all make mistakes. The important part is to learn from them and do not repeat them. Since the beacon, Mark has always been sincerely recognized his mistakes, ask for forgiveness and try to fix those mistakes. I see maturity and integrity of character in this. Things that the young Zuckerberg did not have (ex: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/25/im-ceo-bitch/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/25/im-ceo-bitch/ and https://i.redd.it/cqyiaxm1j6n01.jpg https://i.redd.it/cqyiaxm1j6n01.jpg ). I find remarkable that was able to quickly grow up and become a better leader.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    As far as I can find he's only asked for forgiveness once, in a Yom Kippur message, and not in relation to any specific mistake(s). Not that I find "forgiveness" to be a legitimate ethical standard, since "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" has been used to do bad stuff on purpose for a long time.
    - ChrisCinelli 8y ago
      I remember this: https://techcrunch.com/2007/12/05/zuckerberg-saves-face-apologies-for-beacon/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/12/05/zuckerberg-saves-face-apol... but yes, he never asked forgiveness for this: https://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-is-this-mark-zuckerbergs-embarrassing-childh-5993535 https://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-is-this-mark-zuckerbergs-embar... ;-)
ChrisCinelli 8y ago
To be more specific, I think FB could reach the valuation that it did because Mark Zuckerberg's voting power, not despite it. He had explicitly talked about the average SV' short term mentality multiple times: "It's still a little short-term focused in a way that bothers me," Zuckerberg says of Silicon Valley. "There's people who want to start a company not knowing what they want to do, or just to flip it." ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/31/mark-zuckerberg-silicon-valleys-too-interested-in-quick-flip/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/31/mark-zuck... ) When it is time to cash out investors do whatever they can to pump up the valuation of a company even if it ends up creating handicaps for the future. When that happened to FB, Mark Zuckerberg was able to oppose to it.
- munk-a 8y ago
  This is sort of just the wide-spread symptom of the free-market-ish system practiced in America. Everything is being reduced to how to maximize RoI, reduce the cycle to realize that RoI and ensure that RoI will be realized. Going for a profit isn't a bad idea from a company, but focusing a company on achieving a localized maxima of profit misses out on the larger benefits long term planning can yield.
  - travisoneill1 8y ago
    While it may be bad for individual companies, their failure does not prevent somebody else from doing whatever it is they failed to do because of short term thinking.
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      No, but an excess of business moats and outsized legal departments very often do
- phs318u 8y ago
  If Zuckerberg has a long-term vision that he is driving FB towards, what is it?
VikingCoder 8y ago
The idea of an Enlightened Despot is great. The reality of a Tyranny is terrible. Which is Mark Zuckerberg? Probably a bit of both.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Countries work differently than companies. In a country, you could assume that vast majority of citizens think of it as their home and wants to protect its long-term interests (however bad they may be at it). In case of both VC-funded and publicly traded companies, investors/shareholders mostly don't give a damn about the company or the product, they just want to flip it for more than they put in. That promotes extremely short-term thinking and abusive business practices. A "dictator" who actually cares about the company and the product is better.
subjectHarold 8y ago
The reality is the opposite. In the long-term, you are screwed with this voting structure. This structure exists because right here and now, Zuckerberg looks like a good choice. Over the long-term, bad things happen. Human nature is what it is, and the company will be unable to respond (just based on what he has already done, he looks like a below-average manager). Also, most institutions aren't particularly short-term in their outlook (if you are an institution buying a stock that has a valuation like FB...you have to be taking the very long view). Where the short-term "meme" comes from is analysts (whose bark significantly outweighs their bite) and the pressure that failing companies get to preserve shareholder value (and the real-world evidence here is that managers win close to 100% of the time and take shareholder's money down with them). In my experience, I have seen countless companies decimated by unaccountable managers (no super-voting shares to my recollection, just weak oversight). I am not aware of any public company harmed by short-term thinking. The only possible exceptions are private equity (but for different reasons, still terrible) and acquisitions...but in the latter case, this happens for a ton of other reasons too. In most cases, there is no pressure. Tbh, I don't even understand the logic...you can invest heavily, and that isn't showing up on your income statement immediately. It is true that most investors don't understand the difference between ROI and marginal ROI (these situations probably represent a good chunk of my lifetime returns) but companies feel limited in what they can disclose (and I have had conversations with non-US companies to that effect) and, in the end, the market always works it out.
pbreit 8y ago
I dislike the dual share structures but that's not why these resolutions will fail.
thro_a_way 8y ago
tell that to dying democracies like India where rich political parties in power are able to create thousands of facebook pages with fake information unabated because all facebook under zuckerberg cares about is profit without any responsibility.
mcguire 8y ago
What would they have done worse?
logicallee 8y ago
There's something much worse than investors who don't have more control over Facebook. It's that I don't own any Facebook stock. The reason for that is that I didn't buy any. Shouldn't I get some for free? Maybe other people are willing to pay just like maybe other investors are on board with his ownership structure. But that doesn't give me any Facebook stock. Maybe the government could step in? How can we fix this situation? Anyone have any ideas?
randomsearch 8y ago
Wow, your conterfactual must be _really_ bad of you think things are better under Zuck. A reminder for those with short memories, a recap of 2018: https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/12/21/18149099/delete-facebook-scandals-2018-cambridge-analytica https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/12/21/18149099/delete-fa... Was enough for me to permanently delete my account. So zuck fails my standards.
astrofinch 8y ago
Also on the homepage right now: https://alistapart.com/article/nothing-fails-like-success/ https://alistapart.com/article/nothing-fails-like-success/ It's all about how social media companies are forced to pursue profit above all else and this harms society. Your average public corporation has a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for its shareholders. So arguably, we are lucky that Facebook is not your average public corporation. Zuck has plenty of money, and he's pledged to give almost all of it away, so he is probably motivated by more than just profit. He has been talking the talk about fixing social media, let's see if he walks the walk.
TheTruth1234 8y ago
Couldn't disagree more. Hope FB crashes and burns ASAP.
muckrakerz 8y ago
If this is true then why go through the Kabuki theater of having a corporation at all. Zuckerberg is the central decision maker and there is no partial ownership in the company. Public corporations in theory are supposed to be owned by a wide array of investors. The fact is FaceBook skirts every regulation in existence. I'm pro Market in general but I do believe in some regulation. And FB effectively doesn't have any.

mrweasel 8y ago

I think you're right. If we think that Zuckerbergs decisions where bad, in terms of user privacy, just wait until impatient shareholders are in charge. In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point.

soup10 8y ago
They would be in much worse shape if they hadn't acquired Instagram at a good price.
- bartread 8y ago
  Quite possibly, but wasn't it Mark Zuckerberg who thought that acquisition was a good idea?
  - soup10 8y ago
    True but its a bit of a problem when your hegemony keeps getting threatened by the latest flavor of the month social network and quarter after quarter your getting pressured by shareholders to keep increasing advertising revenue.
    - zitterbewegung 8y ago
      Buying a company out is much cheaper than it disrupting you .
      - soup10 8y ago
        true but future companies are under no obligation to sell and as facebook's reputation goes down the gutter i would say are even not likely
        zitterbewegung 8y ago
        The future companies that don’t accept buy outs and are successful are obviously the ones who will beat you .
        rdlecler1 8y ago
        SnapChat?
        shrisukhani 8y ago
        True but future companies’ decisions to sell will in almost all cases not be based on FB’s reputation - even if it goes down the gutter - than the material terms of the acquisition. And as for those that don’t get acquired, I think we can all take a quick look at Snap’s market performance and bleeding execs. That’s not to say that FB will not be disrupted - everyone eventually is. Just that it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime in the near future.
bartread 8y ago
Tend to agree. I'm no fan of either Facebook or Zuckerberg. My attempts to leave it all behind have thus far proven unsuccessful, and the fact that FB owns both WhatsApp and Instagram doesn't help. Still, I'm almost shocked by how viscerally unsympathetic I feel towards these shareholders. I genuinely believe their stewardship would be worse for both Facebook and its users: they'd mismanage Facebook into the ground and, along the way, would utterly compromise users in increasingly desperate attempts to turn things around.
- nullc 8y ago
  If they burn facebook to the ground this may be better in the long run both for the users and for society at large.
  - confiscate 8y ago
    I disagree. That would feel like going back to the year 1999
    - gameswithgo 8y ago
      are you for real? i don’t understand why anyone has trouble leaving. there has been a huge brain drain it isn’t a good place now.
      - torqueTorrent 8y ago
        >> don’t understand why anyone has trouble leaving I also find it puzzling. Then again, as with cults or other bottom feeding fads and the increasingly ubiquitous, various and sundry addictive mires and dark patterns, to avoid the trouble in leaving, it is best not to enroll in the first place.
      - bartread 8y ago
        Sure: most social activities are arranged on either Facebook or WhatsApp. I tried going without but it's quite inconvenient.
rhizome 8y ago
Do you also see him as the sole cause of the company's problems?
- rock_hard 8y ago
  The companies problems are mostly societal problems...their fates are tied though
  - rhizome 8y ago
    That's cool that he gets credit for all the good stuff while blaming society for everything bad that happens.
    - meowface 8y ago
      Or you could say he gets credit for all the bad stuff when society is often to blame, and not much credit for the good stuff. That seems to be the most common response from everyone, including the tech community. I think businesses whose primary source of income is advertising to their users can't really avoid being unethical. Facebook is just one of the biggest case studies of that model. The business model is rotten from the core, but I don't think it's Zuck's fault. Any other CEO would also have to grapple with that in a way that will inevitably hurt users and help advertisers. If I were Zuck I would maybe consider trying to start a new tech company with a completely different business model. "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." aside, I don't really think he's a bad guy. No worse than Schmidt or Dorsey etc., at least.
    - shrisukhani 8y ago
      He doesn’t get credit for all the good stuff and always makes it a point to more-than-generously _attribute_(not share) the credit to the leaders within FB responsible for that stuff.
Aunche 8y ago
> In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point. Him and Sheryl Sandberg.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  I think Sandberg may be part of the problem at FB. I do concede, despite my FB hate, that having Zuck is about 15 thousand times better than having shareholders in charge over there.
- armitron 8y ago
  Sandberg is a major liability and should be gotten rid of ASAP. Mark has a vision and has made some good choices, prescient moves and (most importantly) great long-term bets but Sandberg looks to me like a career opportunist, completely out of touch with technology.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    What are you talking about? If you know anything about the history of Facebook as an entity, you'll recognize her contributions to the business. Facebook wouldn't be the juggernaut it is today without her. She is extremely effective and perhaps one of the best technology executives in recent history.
headsoup 8y ago
I'm not sure it's clear that the shareholders are the driving force of short term greed or just an excuse for businesses to do so. After all businesses set their guidance and a lot of shareholders would probably prefer medium-long term returns, aside the speculators.
dao- 8y ago
> In many ways I believe that Zuckerberg is the sole reason that Facebook hasn't crashed and burned at this point. Then again, maybe societies would be better off if Facebook crashed and burned.
kjar 8y ago
Let it crash

staticautomatic 8y ago

I find Zuckerberg's decisions largely indistinguishable from what I'd expect of an investor demanding short terms gains over long term vision and sustainability.

skinnymuch 8y ago
Buying IG and Whatsapp doesn’t seem to be in line with what investors would do, is it? Especially the latter. The treatment of Messenger and Whatsapp as well.
ChrisCinelli 8y ago
For sure Mark has made a bunch of decisions looking at the short term gain in his life. But he also did not see or largely underestimated the long term repercussions. We all make mistakes. The important part is to learn from them and do not repeat them. Since the beacon, Mark has always been sincerely recognized his mistakes, ask for forgiveness and try to fix those mistakes. I see maturity and integrity of character in this. Things that the young Zuckerberg did not have (ex: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/25/im-ceo-bitch/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/25/im-ceo-bitch/ and https://i.redd.it/cqyiaxm1j6n01.jpg https://i.redd.it/cqyiaxm1j6n01.jpg ). I find remarkable that was able to quickly grow up and become a better leader.
- rhizome 8y ago
  As far as I can find he's only asked for forgiveness once, in a Yom Kippur message, and not in relation to any specific mistake(s). Not that I find "forgiveness" to be a legitimate ethical standard, since "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" has been used to do bad stuff on purpose for a long time.
  - ChrisCinelli 8y ago
    I remember this: https://techcrunch.com/2007/12/05/zuckerberg-saves-face-apologies-for-beacon/ https://techcrunch.com/2007/12/05/zuckerberg-saves-face-apol... but yes, he never asked forgiveness for this: https://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-is-this-mark-zuckerbergs-embarrassing-childh-5993535 https://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-is-this-mark-zuckerbergs-embar... ;-)

ChrisCinelli 8y ago

To be more specific, I think FB could reach the valuation that it did because Mark Zuckerberg's voting power, not despite it. He had explicitly talked about the average SV' short term mentality multiple times: "It's still a little short-term focused in a way that bothers me," Zuckerberg says of Silicon Valley. "There's people who want to start a company not knowing what they want to do, or just to flip it." ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/31/mark-zuckerberg-silicon-valleys-too-interested-in-quick-flip/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/31/mark-zuck... ) When it is time to cash out investors do whatever they can to pump up the valuation of a company even if it ends up creating handicaps for the future. When that happened to FB, Mark Zuckerberg was able to oppose to it.

munk-a 8y ago
This is sort of just the wide-spread symptom of the free-market-ish system practiced in America. Everything is being reduced to how to maximize RoI, reduce the cycle to realize that RoI and ensure that RoI will be realized. Going for a profit isn't a bad idea from a company, but focusing a company on achieving a localized maxima of profit misses out on the larger benefits long term planning can yield.
- travisoneill1 8y ago
  While it may be bad for individual companies, their failure does not prevent somebody else from doing whatever it is they failed to do because of short term thinking.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    No, but an excess of business moats and outsized legal departments very often do
phs318u 8y ago
If Zuckerberg has a long-term vision that he is driving FB towards, what is it?

VikingCoder 8y ago

The idea of an Enlightened Despot is great. The reality of a Tyranny is terrible. Which is Mark Zuckerberg? Probably a bit of both.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Countries work differently than companies. In a country, you could assume that vast majority of citizens think of it as their home and wants to protect its long-term interests (however bad they may be at it). In case of both VC-funded and publicly traded companies, investors/shareholders mostly don't give a damn about the company or the product, they just want to flip it for more than they put in. That promotes extremely short-term thinking and abusive business practices. A "dictator" who actually cares about the company and the product is better.

subjectHarold 8y ago

The reality is the opposite. In the long-term, you are screwed with this voting structure. This structure exists because right here and now, Zuckerberg looks like a good choice. Over the long-term, bad things happen. Human nature is what it is, and the company will be unable to respond (just based on what he has already done, he looks like a below-average manager). Also, most institutions aren't particularly short-term in their outlook (if you are an institution buying a stock that has a valuation like FB...you have to be taking the very long view). Where the short-term "meme" comes from is analysts (whose bark significantly outweighs their bite) and the pressure that failing companies get to preserve shareholder value (and the real-world evidence here is that managers win close to 100% of the time and take shareholder's money down with them). In my experience, I have seen countless companies decimated by unaccountable managers (no super-voting shares to my recollection, just weak oversight). I am not aware of any public company harmed by short-term thinking. The only possible exceptions are private equity (but for different reasons, still terrible) and acquisitions...but in the latter case, this happens for a ton of other reasons too. In most cases, there is no pressure. Tbh, I don't even understand the logic...you can invest heavily, and that isn't showing up on your income statement immediately. It is true that most investors don't understand the difference between ROI and marginal ROI (these situations probably represent a good chunk of my lifetime returns) but companies feel limited in what they can disclose (and I have had conversations with non-US companies to that effect) and, in the end, the market always works it out.

pbreit 8y ago

I dislike the dual share structures but that's not why these resolutions will fail.

thro_a_way 8y ago

tell that to dying democracies like India where rich political parties in power are able to create thousands of facebook pages with fake information unabated because all facebook under zuckerberg cares about is profit without any responsibility.

mcguire 8y ago

What would they have done worse?

logicallee 8y ago

There's something much worse than investors who don't have more control over Facebook. It's that I don't own any Facebook stock. The reason for that is that I didn't buy any. Shouldn't I get some for free? Maybe other people are willing to pay just like maybe other investors are on board with his ownership structure. But that doesn't give me any Facebook stock. Maybe the government could step in? How can we fix this situation? Anyone have any ideas?

randomsearch 8y ago

Wow, your conterfactual must be _really_ bad of you think things are better under Zuck. A reminder for those with short memories, a recap of 2018: https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/12/21/18149099/delete-facebook-scandals-2018-cambridge-analytica https://www.vox.com/technology/2018/12/21/18149099/delete-fa... Was enough for me to permanently delete my account. So zuck fails my standards.

astrofinch 8y ago

Also on the homepage right now: https://alistapart.com/article/nothing-fails-like-success/ https://alistapart.com/article/nothing-fails-like-success/ It's all about how social media companies are forced to pursue profit above all else and this harms society. Your average public corporation has a fiduciary duty to maximize profit for its shareholders. So arguably, we are lucky that Facebook is not your average public corporation. Zuck has plenty of money, and he's pledged to give almost all of it away, so he is probably motivated by more than just profit. He has been talking the talk about fixing social media, let's see if he walks the walk.

TheTruth1234 8y ago

Couldn't disagree more. Hope FB crashes and burns ASAP.

muckrakerz 8y ago

If this is true then why go through the Kabuki theater of having a corporation at all. Zuckerberg is the central decision maker and there is no partial ownership in the company. Public corporations in theory are supposed to be owned by a wide array of investors. The fact is FaceBook skirts every regulation in existence. I'm pro Market in general but I do believe in some regulation. And FB effectively doesn't have any.