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The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point. But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engi

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point. But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem. The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more. My boss's boss, for example, was an engineering leader who had a climber's resume: quickly advancing through positions of more and more power. In my view, he cared about that a great deal, and did not give a shit about the actual harm to users. As soon as he got the chance, he pushed out my boss, laid off the team's managers, me included, and scattered the people to the wind. I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press.

spoonjim 5y ago
This is a place where the founder-CEO-demigod like Zuck should able to make better decisions than a professional team like Twitter. The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government. With all the fawning praise of him as a kid I don’t think Zuck envisioned that one day both Democrats and Republicans would be united in their desire to fuck him over.
- zeruch 5y ago
  "The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government." That is correct, but as with Wall ST, the addiction to the gamble has long been unhinged by an environment that has been lax on regulatory options...so when the blowback actually hits, it will not be just painful it will likely come on the tail end of a ragnarok-grade event that will likely shank the whole industry for a generation because current C-suites are so far up their own asses they can take direct inventory of the last few days of meal plans.
- nonfamous 5y ago
  Zuck is desperate to be regulated: he asks for Congress to step in every time he’s asked. Regulation would be awesome for Facebook: not only would it be a fig leaf for all their social problems (“hey, it’s not our problem anymore”), it would also stifle any potential competitors out of their market. The costs of regulation are regressive: much more easily absorbed by BigCos than any startup.
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    He also wants the legislation to be toothless or misplaced so Facebook can pay lip service and not be fundamentally altered. Haugen just offered congress more surgical solutions than they were drafting as well as valid critiques of their drafts. That's why this particular post from Zuckerberg comes with such a large side of koolaid.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Could be. Some of the proposed regulation I've seen for this specifically exempts companies under, say, $100m/year in annual revenues. So legislators aren't unaware of the problem. Another possibility is that Facebook knows that asking Congress to do something is either a) not going to increase the odds of them doing anything, b) actually decrease the odds by sounding contrite, or c) puts it in a place where Facebook's army of lobbyists and otherwise connected individuals make sure nothing meaningful will get passed into law. It's not a bad bet given how polarized Congress and the American electorate are. And gosh, who is a big enabler of that polarization?
    - intended 5y ago
      The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act. In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives. Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to say who is silenced. How are we going to decide which grey area speech is unwelcome (leaving out obvious things that are illegal). ———— The popular idea is increased human centric moderation, but thats still going to be 2k email escalations for one region per day, at a 10% escalation ratio from a base of 20k.
- surfingdino 5y ago
  Zuck started Facebook as Facemash, a site to judge attractiveness of students by other students. It was a creepy site then and has remained to this day. Sorry, but companies to take after their founders, because the founders set an example of what is OK, how to behave, what their values are, etc. While he may not be responsible for all of the actions of his employees, the buck stops with him.
mise_en_place 5y ago
There is a phenomenon I have witnessed working both in high growth startups and traditional Fortune 500s. At some point, the company starts attracting Dark Triad personality types that cement themselves in upper management positions, usually starting at Director level. These people are extremely dangerous, one of them had access to my corporate laptop (as was standard policy for that company) and would torment me by screwing with me on a daily basis. When an organization becomes too large or bureaucratic, these Dark Triad types hide and typically exert their influence and power and will behind the scenes. This is why these companies seem “evil”, but it’s usually not the founders’ fault, a lot of times they’re unaware of it, or one of the founders is also a sociopath and will protect the evil cabal. That’s my two cents about it anyway.
- itoocode 5y ago
  Totally agree with you, most of the time founders are not aware this is happening down the ladder. I have seen this scenario with the middle layer management protecting their jobs and gate keeping in most companies today.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Either the founder isn't aware, then they just get egulfed in the new culture until they have, at some point, no power left. Or they are among the worst of the pack and drive the new culture. Given that Zuck somehow managed to retain 50+% of voting rights until now, I would put him in the second group. Jeff would be the same. And then you would have the truly exceptional people, that manage to combine the ruthless drive needed to grow a successful company, care about their people and have the capabilities to keep those bad actors out, or at least in check. I saw maybe 1.5 of these people in management functions, middle management that is. Not sure of those black swan unicorns exist as founders so.
- _yoqn 5y ago
  You're absolutely 100% correct. About 2.5% of people have have an inverted viewpoint of their own survival. Meaning, they think they need to squash others down in order to feel superior. As opposed to the logical path which is raise your team together and effectively lead to greater prosperity for all.
shrimpx 5y ago
Your sentiment reflects what I see on teamblind.com. It's all TC and leveling up. A ton of people don't give much of a shit about the subject matter.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  If we go by the content of teamblind, then every company's engineers only care about TC and leveling up.
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    Are you saying that people on teamblind are only focusing on the TC aspect, and also care about many other things, or that only a subset of people only care about TC? If the latter, it’s still worrisome that so many of those people who hop around chasing only TC and not caring about subject matter, are highly valued at these companies like Facebook. Glib and shallow E6 and E7 don’t make for great tech leadership in a company that supposedly cares about ethics and safety.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      I get your point, but glib and shallow climbers are exactly what you want for a company that only supposedly cares. They're very good at supposedly caring!
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Seems like very few engineers that make it to E6+ are the ones rabbling on about "TC or GTFO" on Blind. It's mostly more junior engineers or bad engineers that will never make it past the 2nd or 3rd rung of the career ladder.
- electrondood 5y ago
  Blind is a toxic community, in my opinion.
kbenson 5y ago
I don't necessarily subscribe to the Gervais Principle[1] other than thinking it's an interesting lens through which to reexamine motives and motivations of coworkers, but sometimes the terminology is damn apt (at least for one group...). 1: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- craigyk 5y ago
  Reminds me a bit of one of my favorite books to chuckle over: systemantics
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Were you ever really meant to solve the problem or just be a Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Meant to by whom? I was very serious about it. So was my boss and most of the people on my team. Beyond that, I don't have direct data. My guess is that execs would have been very happy if we could have quickly solved the problem in a way where revenue and growth were not harmed and nobody important had to go out of their way. But online abuse isn't like that. It's a hard problem. So I think execs were satisfied to say they were making a big effort, celebrate some modest gains, and then stop thinking about the problem once it wasn't a giant PR/regulatory issue for them. So it's more like how a lot of people mean to get fit or lose weight. If it's New Year's Day or their doctor scares them enough, they'll get real serious for a while. They probably do mean it, but they mean a lot of other things too, and those win out.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    I think you're exactly describing a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring." The people in power weren't serious about solving the problem (because the only things they'd accept were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or an easy magic solution that could never actually exist), and the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization.
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      no, a Potemkin village is never meant to be real, the parent commenter suggested it was like New Year's resolutions that are meant to be real but in the end people fail because they like their New York cheesecake too much to change. Then the doctor tells them again you need to go on a diet or you will have a heart attack, and they go on the diet for a couple months. having a heart attack may solve the issue. Of course there are clear eyed people who see the situation for what it is, those that stay on don't care and consider the efforts to fight abuse as a Potemkin village.
Dracophoenix 5y ago
> I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press. Could this just be an issue of too many problems to care about and not enough time to solve them all or do you think the indifference was intentional?
- wahnfrieden 5y ago
  Follow the money
  - throwaway2048 5y ago
    Yep, ask yourself how much identifiable return "preventing abuse" has, and then you have your answer for exactly how much these companies actually care about it. Even worse, preventing abuse and other social media ills often lessens engagement, and you know what that means.
    - garbagetime 5y ago
      >Yep, ask yourself how much identifiable return "preventing abuse" has, and then you have your answer for exactly how much these companies actually care about it. Quite a bit, then?
- luckydata 5y ago
  I worked at FB (not for very long) but you can trace everything back to the awful performance process they have (the infamous PSC). At the end of the day, hard to measure stuff doesn't get you promoted while tangibly moving metrics does. If you incentivize people that way, it doesn't take anyone WILLINGLY doing anything evil to end up with a pretty evil thing on your hand. If you optimize for profits and only that, you always end up selling crack cause it's the best business in the world, and that's why it's illegal.
whakim 5y ago
I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not that Facebook or the many people who work there don't care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They do care. It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. In my opinion Haugen's testimony and Zuckerberg's response simply confirm this: Haugen talks a lot about the research that was done and how that research was ignored; Zuckerberg points out a lot of (somewhat lacking in context) facts about the size of Facebook's investments in trust and integrity or openness to regulation.
- rhaksw 5y ago
  Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.
  - trhway 5y ago
    >I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart. Ethics in big business is like chemistry in high energy physics - it just doesn't exist at those levels of money. At these levels they can be affected only by comparable level of money or power, like the government power.
    - jamiek88 5y ago
      Then they are too big and must be broken up.
      - trhway 5y ago
        And who is going to break up TikTok or whatever comes next/instead? The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them . Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - that reminded that foundational tenet of Facebook : Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard Zuck: just ask Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one? Zuck: people just submitted it Zuck: i don’t know why Zuck: they “trust me” Zuck: dumb fucks
atoav 5y ago
> they might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more. Isn't it just about that in the end? I think being good or not is about whether you give yourself the room to do the right thing even when other pressures exist – because they always exist. Being good can be hard, because sometimes it means you have to abandon your usual priorities and stand up to the consequences which will emerge from that decision.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  I completely agree with you. The real judge if someone is doing something good, is when they do it despite the consequences. Otherwise it's meaningless, they simply are not being evil.
swiftcoder 5y ago
Bingo. I never interacted with a person on the FB integrity teams who didn't care deeply about these problems - but their solutions never seemed to make it into production. Whether that was because of the unintentional friction of bureaucracy, or the explicit wishes of execs, is somewhat immaterial in the final analysis.
akudha 5y ago
Whenever I am having a hard time understanding a situation, someone's motives etc in the world of business/politics, I start with follow the money, and it helps. It might sound cliche, but it is also true in a majority of the cases
noslenwerdna 5y ago
Just curious - given your boss's boss is so self-interested, what advantage could he gain from pushing out a subordinate and laying off all the people below?

spoonjim 5y ago

This is a place where the founder-CEO-demigod like Zuck should able to make better decisions than a professional team like Twitter. The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government. With all the fawning praise of him as a kid I don’t think Zuck envisioned that one day both Democrats and Republicans would be united in their desire to fuck him over.

zeruch 5y ago
"The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government." That is correct, but as with Wall ST, the addiction to the gamble has long been unhinged by an environment that has been lax on regulatory options...so when the blowback actually hits, it will not be just painful it will likely come on the tail end of a ragnarok-grade event that will likely shank the whole industry for a generation because current C-suites are so far up their own asses they can take direct inventory of the last few days of meal plans.
nonfamous 5y ago
Zuck is desperate to be regulated: he asks for Congress to step in every time he’s asked. Regulation would be awesome for Facebook: not only would it be a fig leaf for all their social problems (“hey, it’s not our problem anymore”), it would also stifle any potential competitors out of their market. The costs of regulation are regressive: much more easily absorbed by BigCos than any startup.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  He also wants the legislation to be toothless or misplaced so Facebook can pay lip service and not be fundamentally altered. Haugen just offered congress more surgical solutions than they were drafting as well as valid critiques of their drafts. That's why this particular post from Zuckerberg comes with such a large side of koolaid.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Could be. Some of the proposed regulation I've seen for this specifically exempts companies under, say, $100m/year in annual revenues. So legislators aren't unaware of the problem. Another possibility is that Facebook knows that asking Congress to do something is either a) not going to increase the odds of them doing anything, b) actually decrease the odds by sounding contrite, or c) puts it in a place where Facebook's army of lobbyists and otherwise connected individuals make sure nothing meaningful will get passed into law. It's not a bad bet given how polarized Congress and the American electorate are. And gosh, who is a big enabler of that polarization?
  - intended 5y ago
    The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act. In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives. Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to say who is silenced. How are we going to decide which grey area speech is unwelcome (leaving out obvious things that are illegal). ———— The popular idea is increased human centric moderation, but thats still going to be 2k email escalations for one region per day, at a 10% escalation ratio from a base of 20k.
surfingdino 5y ago
Zuck started Facebook as Facemash, a site to judge attractiveness of students by other students. It was a creepy site then and has remained to this day. Sorry, but companies to take after their founders, because the founders set an example of what is OK, how to behave, what their values are, etc. While he may not be responsible for all of the actions of his employees, the buck stops with him.

mise_en_place 5y ago

There is a phenomenon I have witnessed working both in high growth startups and traditional Fortune 500s. At some point, the company starts attracting Dark Triad personality types that cement themselves in upper management positions, usually starting at Director level. These people are extremely dangerous, one of them had access to my corporate laptop (as was standard policy for that company) and would torment me by screwing with me on a daily basis. When an organization becomes too large or bureaucratic, these Dark Triad types hide and typically exert their influence and power and will behind the scenes. This is why these companies seem “evil”, but it’s usually not the founders’ fault, a lot of times they’re unaware of it, or one of the founders is also a sociopath and will protect the evil cabal. That’s my two cents about it anyway.

itoocode 5y ago
Totally agree with you, most of the time founders are not aware this is happening down the ladder. I have seen this scenario with the middle layer management protecting their jobs and gate keeping in most companies today.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Either the founder isn't aware, then they just get egulfed in the new culture until they have, at some point, no power left. Or they are among the worst of the pack and drive the new culture. Given that Zuck somehow managed to retain 50+% of voting rights until now, I would put him in the second group. Jeff would be the same. And then you would have the truly exceptional people, that manage to combine the ruthless drive needed to grow a successful company, care about their people and have the capabilities to keep those bad actors out, or at least in check. I saw maybe 1.5 of these people in management functions, middle management that is. Not sure of those black swan unicorns exist as founders so.
_yoqn 5y ago
You're absolutely 100% correct. About 2.5% of people have have an inverted viewpoint of their own survival. Meaning, they think they need to squash others down in order to feel superior. As opposed to the logical path which is raise your team together and effectively lead to greater prosperity for all.

shrimpx 5y ago

Your sentiment reflects what I see on teamblind.com. It's all TC and leveling up. A ton of people don't give much of a shit about the subject matter.

seattle_spring 5y ago
If we go by the content of teamblind, then every company's engineers only care about TC and leveling up.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  Are you saying that people on teamblind are only focusing on the TC aspect, and also care about many other things, or that only a subset of people only care about TC? If the latter, it’s still worrisome that so many of those people who hop around chasing only TC and not caring about subject matter, are highly valued at these companies like Facebook. Glib and shallow E6 and E7 don’t make for great tech leadership in a company that supposedly cares about ethics and safety.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    I get your point, but glib and shallow climbers are exactly what you want for a company that only supposedly cares. They're very good at supposedly caring!
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Seems like very few engineers that make it to E6+ are the ones rabbling on about "TC or GTFO" on Blind. It's mostly more junior engineers or bad engineers that will never make it past the 2nd or 3rd rung of the career ladder.
electrondood 5y ago
Blind is a toxic community, in my opinion.

kbenson 5y ago

I don't necessarily subscribe to the Gervais Principle[1] other than thinking it's an interesting lens through which to reexamine motives and motivations of coworkers, but sometimes the terminology is damn apt (at least for one group...). 1: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

craigyk 5y ago
Reminds me a bit of one of my favorite books to chuckle over: systemantics

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

Were you ever really meant to solve the problem or just be a Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring.

wpietri 5y ago
Meant to by whom? I was very serious about it. So was my boss and most of the people on my team. Beyond that, I don't have direct data. My guess is that execs would have been very happy if we could have quickly solved the problem in a way where revenue and growth were not harmed and nobody important had to go out of their way. But online abuse isn't like that. It's a hard problem. So I think execs were satisfied to say they were making a big effort, celebrate some modest gains, and then stop thinking about the problem once it wasn't a giant PR/regulatory issue for them. So it's more like how a lot of people mean to get fit or lose weight. If it's New Year's Day or their doctor scares them enough, they'll get real serious for a while. They probably do mean it, but they mean a lot of other things too, and those win out.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  I think you're exactly describing a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring." The people in power weren't serious about solving the problem (because the only things they'd accept were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or an easy magic solution that could never actually exist), and the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization.
  - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
    no, a Potemkin village is never meant to be real, the parent commenter suggested it was like New Year's resolutions that are meant to be real but in the end people fail because they like their New York cheesecake too much to change. Then the doctor tells them again you need to go on a diet or you will have a heart attack, and they go on the diet for a couple months. having a heart attack may solve the issue. Of course there are clear eyed people who see the situation for what it is, those that stay on don't care and consider the efforts to fight abuse as a Potemkin village.

Dracophoenix 5y ago

> I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press. Could this just be an issue of too many problems to care about and not enough time to solve them all or do you think the indifference was intentional?

wahnfrieden 5y ago
Follow the money
- throwaway2048 5y ago
  Yep, ask yourself how much identifiable return "preventing abuse" has, and then you have your answer for exactly how much these companies actually care about it. Even worse, preventing abuse and other social media ills often lessens engagement, and you know what that means.
  - garbagetime 5y ago
    >Yep, ask yourself how much identifiable return "preventing abuse" has, and then you have your answer for exactly how much these companies actually care about it. Quite a bit, then?
luckydata 5y ago
I worked at FB (not for very long) but you can trace everything back to the awful performance process they have (the infamous PSC). At the end of the day, hard to measure stuff doesn't get you promoted while tangibly moving metrics does. If you incentivize people that way, it doesn't take anyone WILLINGLY doing anything evil to end up with a pretty evil thing on your hand. If you optimize for profits and only that, you always end up selling crack cause it's the best business in the world, and that's why it's illegal.

whakim 5y ago

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not that Facebook or the many people who work there don't care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They do care. It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. In my opinion Haugen's testimony and Zuckerberg's response simply confirm this: Haugen talks a lot about the research that was done and how that research was ignored; Zuckerberg points out a lot of (somewhat lacking in context) facts about the size of Facebook's investments in trust and integrity or openness to regulation.

rhaksw 5y ago
Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.
- trhway 5y ago
  >I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart. Ethics in big business is like chemistry in high energy physics - it just doesn't exist at those levels of money. At these levels they can be affected only by comparable level of money or power, like the government power.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Then they are too big and must be broken up.
    - trhway 5y ago
      And who is going to break up TikTok or whatever comes next/instead? The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them . Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - that reminded that foundational tenet of Facebook : Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard Zuck: just ask Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one? Zuck: people just submitted it Zuck: i don’t know why Zuck: they “trust me” Zuck: dumb fucks

atoav 5y ago

> they might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more. Isn't it just about that in the end? I think being good or not is about whether you give yourself the room to do the right thing even when other pressures exist – because they always exist. Being good can be hard, because sometimes it means you have to abandon your usual priorities and stand up to the consequences which will emerge from that decision.

cycomanic 5y ago
I completely agree with you. The real judge if someone is doing something good, is when they do it despite the consequences. Otherwise it's meaningless, they simply are not being evil.

swiftcoder 5y ago

Bingo. I never interacted with a person on the FB integrity teams who didn't care deeply about these problems - but their solutions never seemed to make it into production. Whether that was because of the unintentional friction of bureaucracy, or the explicit wishes of execs, is somewhat immaterial in the final analysis.

akudha 5y ago

Whenever I am having a hard time understanding a situation, someone's motives etc in the world of business/politics, I start with follow the money, and it helps. It might sound cliche, but it is also true in a majority of the cases

noslenwerdna 5y ago

Just curious - given your boss's boss is so self-interested, what advantage could he gain from pushing out a subordinate and laying off all the people below?