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I worked there until earlier this year, and often posted on HN while I was there. The biggest reason you don't see comments from Facebook employees is exactly

I worked there until earlier this year, and often posted on HN while I was there. The biggest reason you don't see comments from Facebook employees is exactly what others here have pointed out: HN is overwhelmingly negative in its attitude toward Facebook. This leads to a super pragmatic reason not to post. If you post anything neutral or positive, you typically get downvoted a lot. If your comment somehow avoids going negative, then you get a ton of replies accusing you of being a paid shill, and people stalking you on other social media trying to "out" you as a shill. That's not fun and I assume it's enough to discourage most people from posting. That being said, I used to post a lot about FB and still do, even when it gets me downvoted. I worked on recommendation ML and contributed to a bunch of different surfaces, so I think I have an unusually well informed perspective on how things actually work at FB and what sorts of processes/motivations lead to the negative outcomes that cause bad PR. I think FB has a lot of problems, but as an insider with no extreme political views, it was very difficult for me to convince myself that anything FB has done is morally wrong. HN has some decent flamewar prevention automation to prevent me from spending too much time arguing here, so at the end of the day its a decent way to vent and represent an alternative point of view besides "FB bad Zuck evil".

toast0 5y ago
I left FB (well WhatsApp) in 2019. I didn't necessarily care about downvotes, but commenting on work related matters is generally a no go, I wasn't authorized to speak about work stuff, and I didn't want to say anything that's going to get me in trouble at work. Also, while I might sometimes have wanted to mention something, I certainly didn't want to answer follow up questions, and that provides unsatisfying dialog.
Dracophoenix 5y ago
>so I think I have an unusually well informed perspective on how things actually work at FB and what sorts of processes/motivations lead to the negative outcomes that cause bad PR. Could you enlighten as to what those are? >I think FB has a lot of problems, but as an insider with no extreme political views, it was very difficult for me to convince myself that anything FB has done is morally wrong. My personal complaints would be: - Mass censorship over certain topics (e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse) - Forcing previously purchased goods (e.g. Oculus headsets) to be tied to a Facebook Account - Paying for zero-day exploits of the Tails operating system - the Real name policy - Shadow profiles created by inserting hidden pixels into unaffiliated webpages
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  > Could you enlighten as to what those are? Generally speaking, I believe company leadership is directionally correct on most issues, with one very important exception (pre-CA data openness). The metrics that company leadership cares about are pro-social and correlate well with user happiness long term. Because of hierarchical delegation, teams and individual's sometimes have incentives that aren't well aligned with company priorities. For example, suppose the company wants to encourage people to share more pictures they take in the app's camera. Sharing these pictures is (IMO) well aligned with user happiness. However, you can't task most ICs with causing users to share more videos, it's too hard to directly influence. So instead you task somebody with increasing the number of images captured (not only shared) because this is easier to change. The result? Lottery-style "which are you" camera effects that encourage users to take 10s of pictures for each share. Stuff like that often plays out without leadership noticing for months or years. I think FB is getting much better at noticing these sorts of things and intervening more quickly, but it's not possible to fix everything instantly. I'm not going to debate your other points, this isn't the right venue for that.

toast0 5y ago

I left FB (well WhatsApp) in 2019. I didn't necessarily care about downvotes, but commenting on work related matters is generally a no go, I wasn't authorized to speak about work stuff, and I didn't want to say anything that's going to get me in trouble at work. Also, while I might sometimes have wanted to mention something, I certainly didn't want to answer follow up questions, and that provides unsatisfying dialog.

Dracophoenix 5y ago

>so I think I have an unusually well informed perspective on how things actually work at FB and what sorts of processes/motivations lead to the negative outcomes that cause bad PR. Could you enlighten as to what those are? >I think FB has a lot of problems, but as an insider with no extreme political views, it was very difficult for me to convince myself that anything FB has done is morally wrong. My personal complaints would be: - Mass censorship over certain topics (e.g. Kyle Rittenhouse) - Forcing previously purchased goods (e.g. Oculus headsets) to be tied to a Facebook Account - Paying for zero-day exploits of the Tails operating system - the Real name policy - Shadow profiles created by inserting hidden pixels into unaffiliated webpages

mgraczyk 5y ago
> Could you enlighten as to what those are? Generally speaking, I believe company leadership is directionally correct on most issues, with one very important exception (pre-CA data openness). The metrics that company leadership cares about are pro-social and correlate well with user happiness long term. Because of hierarchical delegation, teams and individual's sometimes have incentives that aren't well aligned with company priorities. For example, suppose the company wants to encourage people to share more pictures they take in the app's camera. Sharing these pictures is (IMO) well aligned with user happiness. However, you can't task most ICs with causing users to share more videos, it's too hard to directly influence. So instead you task somebody with increasing the number of images captured (not only shared) because this is easier to change. The result? Lottery-style "which are you" camera effects that encourage users to take 10s of pictures for each share. Stuff like that often plays out without leadership noticing for months or years. I think FB is getting much better at noticing these sorts of things and intervening more quickly, but it's not possible to fix everything instantly. I'm not going to debate your other points, this isn't the right venue for that.