4 ms·

I don’t know if I’d be cynical in that particular way. Maybe the real cynicism is more banal. FB was and always will be “viral.” When Zuck was in college, this

I don’t know if I’d be cynical in that particular way. Maybe the real cynicism is more banal. FB was and always will be “viral.” When Zuck was in college, this pretty much amounted to stalking all your classmates (for those who remember when it was university students only). Zuck is getting towards middle age now. “News” is the new viral. We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?) Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.

robertlagrant 5y ago
> Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  There are some companies that are set up to make money. Most of the banks in existence exist to make money and they won’t hesitate to say so, and they will say that they want to make you money too. Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize. To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008. But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.
- b3morales 5y ago
  Even if we grant that the business's focus is completely on making the next dollar, someone, or some cluster of someones, is deciding how best to go about that. Their interests, knowledge, and blind spots will absolutely affect what they choose as the steps to take to get the money.

robertlagrant 5y ago

> Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.

lambdasquirrel 5y ago
There are some companies that are set up to make money. Most of the banks in existence exist to make money and they won’t hesitate to say so, and they will say that they want to make you money too. Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize. To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008. But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.
b3morales 5y ago
Even if we grant that the business's focus is completely on making the next dollar, someone, or some cluster of someones, is deciding how best to go about that. Their interests, knowledge, and blind spots will absolutely affect what they choose as the steps to take to get the money.