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More and more I get the feeling that the majority of the HN crowd are FB employees. Any other post about crypto is a scam. Any other tech than react is immatu

More and more I get the feeling that the majority of the HN crowd are FB employees. Any other post about crypto is a scam. Any other tech than react is immature. Etc etc. Have fun at FB guys, I hope your share vest soon

xwdv 7y ago
Not an FB employee but like many HN members with assets in tech stocks, a sizable portion of my portfolio consists of FB stock from the days when it was around $50. FB has made me good money, and I don’t get shaken by what I see on the news. At the end of the day, FB still does more good things than bad, and I am more likely to take them seriously when they set out on a new venture.
- news_to_me 7y ago
  > At the end of the day, FB still does more good things than bad I don't think this is a claim you can make these days without a good argument behind it. It certainly seems false to me. > I am more likely to take them seriously when they set out on a new venture This is real, though. Whatever FB are, they're not dumb and whatever they do should be taken seriously.
ravenstine 7y ago
To be fair, this industry has always been full of sycophants, although I think over the last decade it's been overlapping more and more with tech-evaneglists, get rich quick gurus, and other such snake oil. Facebook is a greater epitome of those combined things than even Google because it's personified in one dude. I've known people who practically want to lick the ground he walks on just to taste of the success of a coder who made it big. I also believe that Facebook has just made it more obvious how many borderline sociopaths exist in the world of software engineering. I suspect that there are tones of engineers who spent most of their young lives cooped up in front of a computer and had parents too distracted to instill much morality in them, so they grow up to work for slimy advertising firms disguised as "tech" and come up with rationalizations like wanting to make the world "more connected" to distract from the fact they are making obscene profits off the ignorance of the masses. These people have always been around, but it took a period of time for tech-thats-not-tech companies to see massive growth for their behavior to become more obvious.
- igravious 7y ago
  Brilliant insightful comment – and of course you're being downvoted for voicing your insight because it reflects negatively on the tech elites around here. Just downvotes, but no actual rebuttals. I just finished watching a BoomBu$t video on YouTube. The analysts points out that Facebook has for the longest time been blocking ICO adverts and other cryptocurrency adverts. Now that Facebook is releasing its own cryptocurrency apparently they're relaxing the rules. How convenient. That should fall foul of anti-trust laws if prosecutors within the government were doing their jobs properly. Facebook clearly have a social media monopoly in many many markets through FB/messenger/WhatsApp/Instagram. Banning a certain type of advertising before you yourself enter that advertising space is flat out anti-competitive. Facebook should be broken up into those four component imho. Has anybody on HN mentioned this shady practice? Not that I can see. You'd want to be very foolish to use a corporate cryptocurrency from a company as unethical as Facebook. source: https://youtu.be/HhDpWrIBseo?t=1187 https://youtu.be/HhDpWrIBseo?t=1187
NoodleIncident 7y ago
Are you joking? In every thread about FB besides this one, almost every single comment actively bashes FB.
- seangrant 7y ago
  This is something I've wondered... Do all Facebook/Google employees drink the Kool aid? Are there no privacy proponents?
  - entropea 7y ago
    You have to have loose morals & ethics, be a misanthrope, or be completely oblivious to the world to even work at Facebook or Google anymore.
    - igravious 7y ago
      I think you could make that case easily for Facebook but less easily for Google. The number of useful Google products (AOSP, for instance) is enormous. They contribute massively to open source†. Their co-founders clearly have less evil tendencies that Facebook's founder. Their free products are insanely useful. A lot of Google's products have a price tag attached to them especially for the enterprise sector where they don't trade your data. I would compare Google to Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook is a totally different entity – I'm of the opinion that Facebook should _never_ have been allowed to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram. † Before anyone points out that FB contribute to open source… they've about, what, 50 projects, Google has over 2,000 and has been running that Google Summer of Code project for many years which supports 1,000s of projects outside Google.
ipsum2 7y ago
This is objectively wrong. Take a look at how often Facebook is mentioned in the title of submissions in the last month, sorted by number of upvotes: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre... The entire top 10 are entirely negative of Facebook.
elevenoh 7y ago
There's def a sizeable representation of FB folks on HN, know some personally.
dang 7y ago
This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to post insinuations about astroturfing. Those are internet poison and nearly always imaginary. (I've written about this ad nasueum for anyone who wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). So please don't do that, and please don't post unsubstantive comments in general. We're hoping for thoughtful conversation here, not flames. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

xwdv 7y ago

Not an FB employee but like many HN members with assets in tech stocks, a sizable portion of my portfolio consists of FB stock from the days when it was around $50. FB has made me good money, and I don’t get shaken by what I see on the news. At the end of the day, FB still does more good things than bad, and I am more likely to take them seriously when they set out on a new venture.

news_to_me 7y ago
> At the end of the day, FB still does more good things than bad I don't think this is a claim you can make these days without a good argument behind it. It certainly seems false to me. > I am more likely to take them seriously when they set out on a new venture This is real, though. Whatever FB are, they're not dumb and whatever they do should be taken seriously.

ravenstine 7y ago

To be fair, this industry has always been full of sycophants, although I think over the last decade it's been overlapping more and more with tech-evaneglists, get rich quick gurus, and other such snake oil. Facebook is a greater epitome of those combined things than even Google because it's personified in one dude. I've known people who practically want to lick the ground he walks on just to taste of the success of a coder who made it big. I also believe that Facebook has just made it more obvious how many borderline sociopaths exist in the world of software engineering. I suspect that there are tones of engineers who spent most of their young lives cooped up in front of a computer and had parents too distracted to instill much morality in them, so they grow up to work for slimy advertising firms disguised as "tech" and come up with rationalizations like wanting to make the world "more connected" to distract from the fact they are making obscene profits off the ignorance of the masses. These people have always been around, but it took a period of time for tech-thats-not-tech companies to see massive growth for their behavior to become more obvious.

igravious 7y ago
Brilliant insightful comment – and of course you're being downvoted for voicing your insight because it reflects negatively on the tech elites around here. Just downvotes, but no actual rebuttals. I just finished watching a BoomBu$t video on YouTube. The analysts points out that Facebook has for the longest time been blocking ICO adverts and other cryptocurrency adverts. Now that Facebook is releasing its own cryptocurrency apparently they're relaxing the rules. How convenient. That should fall foul of anti-trust laws if prosecutors within the government were doing their jobs properly. Facebook clearly have a social media monopoly in many many markets through FB/messenger/WhatsApp/Instagram. Banning a certain type of advertising before you yourself enter that advertising space is flat out anti-competitive. Facebook should be broken up into those four component imho. Has anybody on HN mentioned this shady practice? Not that I can see. You'd want to be very foolish to use a corporate cryptocurrency from a company as unethical as Facebook. source: https://youtu.be/HhDpWrIBseo?t=1187 https://youtu.be/HhDpWrIBseo?t=1187

NoodleIncident 7y ago

Are you joking? In every thread about FB besides this one, almost every single comment actively bashes FB.

seangrant 7y ago
This is something I've wondered... Do all Facebook/Google employees drink the Kool aid? Are there no privacy proponents?
- entropea 7y ago
  You have to have loose morals & ethics, be a misanthrope, or be completely oblivious to the world to even work at Facebook or Google anymore.
  - igravious 7y ago
    I think you could make that case easily for Facebook but less easily for Google. The number of useful Google products (AOSP, for instance) is enormous. They contribute massively to open source†. Their co-founders clearly have less evil tendencies that Facebook's founder. Their free products are insanely useful. A lot of Google's products have a price tag attached to them especially for the enterprise sector where they don't trade your data. I would compare Google to Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. Facebook is a totally different entity – I'm of the opinion that Facebook should _never_ have been allowed to acquire WhatsApp and Instagram. † Before anyone points out that FB contribute to open source… they've about, what, 50 projects, Google has over 2,000 and has been running that Google Summer of Code project for many years which supports 1,000s of projects outside Google.

ipsum2 7y ago

This is objectively wrong. Take a look at how often Facebook is mentioned in the title of submissions in the last month, sorted by number of upvotes: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastMonth&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook&sort=byPopularity&pre... The entire top 10 are entirely negative of Facebook.

elevenoh 7y ago

There's def a sizeable representation of FB folks on HN, know some personally.

dang 7y ago

This comment breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to post insinuations about astroturfing. Those are internet poison and nearly always imaginary. (I've written about this ad nasueum for anyone who wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturfing https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...). So please don't do that, and please don't post unsubstantive comments in general. We're hoping for thoughtful conversation here, not flames. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html