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This is not a surprising headline. If you have values about privacy, decency, civil discourse, honesty or integrity you wouldn’t want to work there. Also, if yo

This is not a surprising headline. If you have values about privacy, decency, civil discourse, honesty or integrity you wouldn’t want to work there. Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB. There’s a litany of abuses that they have either been horribly naive too or downright negligent in addressing. If you are bright-eyed optimistic about Facebook I'd be interested to hear your counterpoint to all of the scandal. I don't think there is any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise but it isn't surprising that FB would have a decline in hiring.

nostrademons 7y ago
> I don't think there is any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise I feel like Google started that way, and then lost its way sometime between 2009-2012. Projects like Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Summer of Code, Google Reader, Google Open Source, Google.org, and pulling out of China didn't really have much of a business justification, but were simply something good that they could do. Unfortunately they're a public company, and when you start struggling to meet analysts' (perpetually inflating) estimates, being good - or at least not evil - is usually the first thing on the chopping block.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  I don't think that it has anything to do with altruism. Back then, it was not the right time to optimise for profit as new and exciting things were happening daily, it was time to explore not to exploit. These days the exciting things are happening in other areas, so for the Internet giants, it's time to optimize for profit.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    > it was time to explore not to exploit. Is that not a pretty good definition of not being evil. IMO it is still the time to explore not exploit, even if that's not what they're doing.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Also, as a smaller player, they stood more to benefit from open source projects (Android and Chrome) and open standards (the web and email). Now that they're on top, the most rational strategy is to secure their position by destroying the bridges they used to get there, locking down those open technologies.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      In other words, the most rational strategy is to become evil.
      - _bxg1 7y ago
        Correct. Which is why pure capitalism is broken.
- Balgair 7y ago
  > and then lost its way sometime between 2009-2012. Tahrir Square was the high water mark of the old school techies. The failure of tech to effect real and lasting change really hasn't been understood by the techies, even still. That optimism about the future and tech's role in it, is gone.
  - throwaway165 7y ago
    Based on discussions I’ve had with Egyptians, Facebook was used to track down dissidents after the counter-revolution that brought Sisi into power. Not sure if it was Tahrir-era posts that got them into trouble, or criticism of the Sisi government. The only lasting legacy of social media’s role in the Arab spring seems to have been inflating the self-worth of high level execs, and blinding Obama-era officials to the way these sites could be turned into tools of disinformation and repression.
    - maxxxxx 7y ago
      "The only lasting legacy of social media’s role in the Arab spring seems to have been inflating the self-worth of high level execs" When the media talked about the "Twitter revolution" I still remember thinking that there were people risking their lives on the streets and how ridiculous it was that some social media guys drinking lattes in their offices got the credit.
  - solidasparagus 7y ago
    When you spend enough time in the future, you forget all the shitty things about the past that tech has changed and only notice the problems that stand out today. Not sure if you're specifically referencing Tahrir Square with your second sentence, but tech has definitely led to real, lasting and immensely positive change worldwide.
    - Balgair 7y ago
      Oh yeah, but I think all the wind went out of the sails after Tahrir Square. Before, there was such optimisim about tech. Nothing could stop it. Everything would be just better. Look, the oppressed are rising up together! Look, medicine is getting better! Look, we're talking at each other, not shooting and hurting! The arab spring was the high point, the proofed pudding. After the failures there, sure, yes, tech has helped, has advanced the world. But that optimisim that was in Tahrir Square never came back. FB was a way to talk with each other and be a 3rd space, now it's a Skinner box. Wikipedia was the nascent Enclycopedia Galactica, now it's just mostly good and sometimes suspicious. Google wasn't evil, now it works with China to make Orwell sigh. Things are chugging along, yes. But before people actually thought they could change the world for the better, now tech just has mortgages.
- TheOperator 7y ago
  Google had been receiving shit from people for violating privacy since they had the novel idea to release a free email service that scanned your emails to deliver you targeted ads. The consequent centralization of email (ISP provided email pretty much died after) was subsequently used to allow the NSA to scan a huge amount of peoples personal information. I think in the last few years is when things tipped to me distrusting Google more than the boogeyman of older times - Microsoft.
- hinkley 7y ago
  Google never figured out how to make serious bank outside of the marketing department. The fact that they kept the wheels on as long as they did, I gotta give them some respect for that. But they were always destined to end up being amoral at best and a cesspool at worst. If you are starting a company and think you want to be proud of it for the rest of your life, sell a real product, not your users.
  - shemnon42 7y ago
    If by "marketing department" you mean "advertising business" you would be correct. But I am skeptical you meant that.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      Yeah I mean the advertising business. I was feeling a little salty.
  - randomsearch 7y ago
    Not true: they make billions from cloud services. Re: “you are the product” meme. I guess it’s a mechanism for raising awareness of privacy violation, but I really don’t like it. If you were literally the product, you would be a slave. You’re not. What they sell is your attention. A big reason for not liking “you are the product” memes is it misses the key aspect of manipulation, which phrases like “the attention economy” capture. You are being manipulated into giving up more of your time and attention.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Honestly, that seems like splitting hairs to me.
merpnderp 7y ago
Forget the election, just what social networking is doing to young people's minds. They're making money by making a lot of people miserable - just not how I'd want to make a living.
- thatoneuser 7y ago
  Making people miserable and unable to understand the world outside these addictive platforms. I know so so many 20 somethings who genuinely don't understand the facade that is social media. They're giving up their youth in pursuit of a drug and they don't even realize it.
astazangasta 7y ago
>Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB Come on. According to FB the IRA had 80000 posts over a two year period. In the same period there were 33 trillion FB posts. What moron still believes this garbage? FB was hung out to dry by Congressional democrats too spineless to own up to their own pathetic failure to defeat Trump.
- heurist 7y ago
  I don't think you can discount that a concerted effort to create viral content will spread much farther than arbitrary wall posts by individuals. There are statistical methods Facebook could use to figure out how much of an impact that they had and I have not seen any such analysis yet.
  - SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
    Its also worth noting that when something goes viral, its often not contained on one social network, and it becomes impossible for the platform to measure its reach and impact. How could twitter, for example, really measure the impact of something like that video of the Covington High School kids, which was amplified on twitter (shared by a fake account, IIRC), picked up by the media, and then talked about incessantly for weeks, all over the place?
  - astazangasta 7y ago
    That's only one reason this whole thing is bullshit. The other is that the alleged content is just random gibberish with no obvious intent or means to subvert anything. It's only by assuming that every post had its maximum theoretical pernicious effect (and that a pernicious effect was the intent in the first place, which is just supposition) that this whole thing becomes meaningful. It is the desire to make this assumption (that Russia subverted the campaign) that drives the conclusion more than anything else. None of which is to say FB is innocent of blame. But their crime is hooking up an ad network to the social network, not colluding with Russians.
Farradfahren 7y ago
The reason why facebook is no longer interesting as a hire- is - that they are already there. They are the microsoft of social communication. If you want to push new ideas in social media, you open a company and the company gets bought by facebook, if succesfull. Those that float around in that sort of mothership, are usually bureaucrats and legacy maintainers, plus a health dose of suits, who dont care what sort of buisness they actually are in, as long as the numbers grow. Why in the world would one want to go there?
seisvelas 7y ago
I have no money and a very shitty laptop, and thanks to Google Colab's free, hosted Jupyter Notebooks I'm having a blast learning Keras. I'm not saying they're saints, but they've given me something free that's improved my life. Maybe it's ultimately greedy in the sense that later if I need a cloud platform I'll definitely use GCP. But I think that kind of mutualism is actually better in practice than altruism.
- tim333 7y ago
  Also given the power and information that they have I think they've been fairly well behaved. I'm not sure what other commercial management I'd rather have have all my search and email info than the google guys. I guess a non profit might have advantages but then who'd pay for all the servers and the like?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > they've given me something free No, they haven't. They're just making you pay with a different sort of currency. I'm not saying that's good or bad, and I'm not saying that you aren't getting value for what you're paying. I'm just saying that the notion that these things are "free" is incorrect.
  - seisvelas 7y ago
    What is the currency?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Data about you and your use of your machines.
neves 7y ago
Don't forget about WhatsApp. It was the main channel of dissemination of fake news in Brazilian Election. Now we have a global warning denier in the presidency and Amazon deforestation is reaching record levels. Sure there isn't any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise, but to be only pure evil one is Facebook. What really impresses me is that there's still a lot of talented people working there.
- imglorp 7y ago
  I asked one, who pointed out he'd like to make change from within rather than blog about them being evil from the outside. I don't know which way is right.
  - 50656E6973 7y ago
    FB's core business model is the root problem. "Working from within" is vain, naive, and futile; only Zuckerberg has the power to change the business model, and we all know thats not happening.
    - cameronbrown 7y ago
      Unpopular opinion: I don't have a problem with business model (targeted ads) but I have a massive problem with lack of honesty, and this is the distinction between Facebook and Google for me. Google tells you what they collect and gives you the controls to delete it. This is enough for me. Facebook struggles to remember that I want my timeline kept private. I also believe that Cambridge Analytica was no accident, FB knew what they were doing, and they decided to throw them under the bus when they changed the media turned on them. Trust is hard to build up and can be shattered in a day.
- pferde 7y ago
  Any communication platform that is easy to use and easy to reach people on, and will therefore be popular, is great channel of dissemination of fake news. Well, guess what, it is also a great channel for communicating nonfake news, and talking to people that matter to you, and sharing your interests with likeminded people, and... Blaming the platform for carrying fake news seems disingenuous. Fake news have been spreading over any available channels ever since humans learned to talk and figured out that they can tell lies to each other. Blame people for believing most of anything they're told.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
djohnston 7y ago
it's surprising because it's totally false. read the above comments.

nostrademons 7y ago

> I don't think there is any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise I feel like Google started that way, and then lost its way sometime between 2009-2012. Projects like Google Scholar, Google Books, Google Summer of Code, Google Reader, Google Open Source, Google.org, and pulling out of China didn't really have much of a business justification, but were simply something good that they could do. Unfortunately they're a public company, and when you start struggling to meet analysts' (perpetually inflating) estimates, being good - or at least not evil - is usually the first thing on the chopping block.

mrtksn 7y ago
I don't think that it has anything to do with altruism. Back then, it was not the right time to optimise for profit as new and exciting things were happening daily, it was time to explore not to exploit. These days the exciting things are happening in other areas, so for the Internet giants, it's time to optimize for profit.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > it was time to explore not to exploit. Is that not a pretty good definition of not being evil. IMO it is still the time to explore not exploit, even if that's not what they're doing.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Also, as a smaller player, they stood more to benefit from open source projects (Android and Chrome) and open standards (the web and email). Now that they're on top, the most rational strategy is to secure their position by destroying the bridges they used to get there, locking down those open technologies.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    In other words, the most rational strategy is to become evil.
    - _bxg1 7y ago
      Correct. Which is why pure capitalism is broken.
Balgair 7y ago
> and then lost its way sometime between 2009-2012. Tahrir Square was the high water mark of the old school techies. The failure of tech to effect real and lasting change really hasn't been understood by the techies, even still. That optimism about the future and tech's role in it, is gone.
- throwaway165 7y ago
  Based on discussions I’ve had with Egyptians, Facebook was used to track down dissidents after the counter-revolution that brought Sisi into power. Not sure if it was Tahrir-era posts that got them into trouble, or criticism of the Sisi government. The only lasting legacy of social media’s role in the Arab spring seems to have been inflating the self-worth of high level execs, and blinding Obama-era officials to the way these sites could be turned into tools of disinformation and repression.
  - maxxxxx 7y ago
    "The only lasting legacy of social media’s role in the Arab spring seems to have been inflating the self-worth of high level execs" When the media talked about the "Twitter revolution" I still remember thinking that there were people risking their lives on the streets and how ridiculous it was that some social media guys drinking lattes in their offices got the credit.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  When you spend enough time in the future, you forget all the shitty things about the past that tech has changed and only notice the problems that stand out today. Not sure if you're specifically referencing Tahrir Square with your second sentence, but tech has definitely led to real, lasting and immensely positive change worldwide.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    Oh yeah, but I think all the wind went out of the sails after Tahrir Square. Before, there was such optimisim about tech. Nothing could stop it. Everything would be just better. Look, the oppressed are rising up together! Look, medicine is getting better! Look, we're talking at each other, not shooting and hurting! The arab spring was the high point, the proofed pudding. After the failures there, sure, yes, tech has helped, has advanced the world. But that optimisim that was in Tahrir Square never came back. FB was a way to talk with each other and be a 3rd space, now it's a Skinner box. Wikipedia was the nascent Enclycopedia Galactica, now it's just mostly good and sometimes suspicious. Google wasn't evil, now it works with China to make Orwell sigh. Things are chugging along, yes. But before people actually thought they could change the world for the better, now tech just has mortgages.
TheOperator 7y ago
Google had been receiving shit from people for violating privacy since they had the novel idea to release a free email service that scanned your emails to deliver you targeted ads. The consequent centralization of email (ISP provided email pretty much died after) was subsequently used to allow the NSA to scan a huge amount of peoples personal information. I think in the last few years is when things tipped to me distrusting Google more than the boogeyman of older times - Microsoft.
hinkley 7y ago
Google never figured out how to make serious bank outside of the marketing department. The fact that they kept the wheels on as long as they did, I gotta give them some respect for that. But they were always destined to end up being amoral at best and a cesspool at worst. If you are starting a company and think you want to be proud of it for the rest of your life, sell a real product, not your users.
- shemnon42 7y ago
  If by "marketing department" you mean "advertising business" you would be correct. But I am skeptical you meant that.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    Yeah I mean the advertising business. I was feeling a little salty.
- randomsearch 7y ago
  Not true: they make billions from cloud services. Re: “you are the product” meme. I guess it’s a mechanism for raising awareness of privacy violation, but I really don’t like it. If you were literally the product, you would be a slave. You’re not. What they sell is your attention. A big reason for not liking “you are the product” memes is it misses the key aspect of manipulation, which phrases like “the attention economy” capture. You are being manipulated into giving up more of your time and attention.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Honestly, that seems like splitting hairs to me.

merpnderp 7y ago

Forget the election, just what social networking is doing to young people's minds. They're making money by making a lot of people miserable - just not how I'd want to make a living.

thatoneuser 7y ago
Making people miserable and unable to understand the world outside these addictive platforms. I know so so many 20 somethings who genuinely don't understand the facade that is social media. They're giving up their youth in pursuit of a drug and they don't even realize it.

astazangasta 7y ago

>Also, if you feel the company was collusive or willingly complicit in the dissemination of fake news and Russian propaganda efforts during our elections, it’d be a big fat “no” to working there. And it’s not just our democracy that is undermined by FB Come on. According to FB the IRA had 80000 posts over a two year period. In the same period there were 33 trillion FB posts. What moron still believes this garbage? FB was hung out to dry by Congressional democrats too spineless to own up to their own pathetic failure to defeat Trump.

heurist 7y ago
I don't think you can discount that a concerted effort to create viral content will spread much farther than arbitrary wall posts by individuals. There are statistical methods Facebook could use to figure out how much of an impact that they had and I have not seen any such analysis yet.
- SmirkingRevenge 7y ago
  Its also worth noting that when something goes viral, its often not contained on one social network, and it becomes impossible for the platform to measure its reach and impact. How could twitter, for example, really measure the impact of something like that video of the Covington High School kids, which was amplified on twitter (shared by a fake account, IIRC), picked up by the media, and then talked about incessantly for weeks, all over the place?
- astazangasta 7y ago
  That's only one reason this whole thing is bullshit. The other is that the alleged content is just random gibberish with no obvious intent or means to subvert anything. It's only by assuming that every post had its maximum theoretical pernicious effect (and that a pernicious effect was the intent in the first place, which is just supposition) that this whole thing becomes meaningful. It is the desire to make this assumption (that Russia subverted the campaign) that drives the conclusion more than anything else. None of which is to say FB is innocent of blame. But their crime is hooking up an ad network to the social network, not colluding with Russians.

Farradfahren 7y ago

The reason why facebook is no longer interesting as a hire- is - that they are already there. They are the microsoft of social communication. If you want to push new ideas in social media, you open a company and the company gets bought by facebook, if succesfull. Those that float around in that sort of mothership, are usually bureaucrats and legacy maintainers, plus a health dose of suits, who dont care what sort of buisness they actually are in, as long as the numbers grow. Why in the world would one want to go there?

seisvelas 7y ago

I have no money and a very shitty laptop, and thanks to Google Colab's free, hosted Jupyter Notebooks I'm having a blast learning Keras. I'm not saying they're saints, but they've given me something free that's improved my life. Maybe it's ultimately greedy in the sense that later if I need a cloud platform I'll definitely use GCP. But I think that kind of mutualism is actually better in practice than altruism.

tim333 7y ago
Also given the power and information that they have I think they've been fairly well behaved. I'm not sure what other commercial management I'd rather have have all my search and email info than the google guys. I guess a non profit might have advantages but then who'd pay for all the servers and the like?
JohnFen 7y ago
> they've given me something free No, they haven't. They're just making you pay with a different sort of currency. I'm not saying that's good or bad, and I'm not saying that you aren't getting value for what you're paying. I'm just saying that the notion that these things are "free" is incorrect.
- seisvelas 7y ago
  What is the currency?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Data about you and your use of your machines.

neves 7y ago

Don't forget about WhatsApp. It was the main channel of dissemination of fake news in Brazilian Election. Now we have a global warning denier in the presidency and Amazon deforestation is reaching record levels. Sure there isn't any company in the FAANG that is an altruistic enterprise, but to be only pure evil one is Facebook. What really impresses me is that there's still a lot of talented people working there.

imglorp 7y ago
I asked one, who pointed out he'd like to make change from within rather than blog about them being evil from the outside. I don't know which way is right.
- 50656E6973 7y ago
  FB's core business model is the root problem. "Working from within" is vain, naive, and futile; only Zuckerberg has the power to change the business model, and we all know thats not happening.
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    Unpopular opinion: I don't have a problem with business model (targeted ads) but I have a massive problem with lack of honesty, and this is the distinction between Facebook and Google for me. Google tells you what they collect and gives you the controls to delete it. This is enough for me. Facebook struggles to remember that I want my timeline kept private. I also believe that Cambridge Analytica was no accident, FB knew what they were doing, and they decided to throw them under the bus when they changed the media turned on them. Trust is hard to build up and can be shattered in a day.
pferde 7y ago
Any communication platform that is easy to use and easy to reach people on, and will therefore be popular, is great channel of dissemination of fake news. Well, guess what, it is also a great channel for communicating nonfake news, and talking to people that matter to you, and sharing your interests with likeminded people, and... Blaming the platform for carrying fake news seems disingenuous. Fake news have been spreading over any available channels ever since humans learned to talk and figured out that they can tell lies to each other. Blame people for believing most of anything they're told.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

djohnston 7y ago

it's surprising because it's totally false. read the above comments.