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I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be

I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting. The people who clean Meta are not the reason why Meta is hemorrhaging money. I'm sure they actually do their jobs very well. They should fire the people who are actually causing the problems. Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine. They are also discouraged that facebook started deciding which friends are important to the user instead of letting the user pick. The people who implemented these ?features? should be the first to be fired. Similarly, the reason everyone is walking away from Google is because the search is getting worse. Why? Because Google increasingly doesn't allow you to search for what actually exists, but instead what it thinks you should see. Fire the people who did this. Fire them because they are destroying your company. I don't care if you don't, it's your wealth to lose, but I also know that's not who will be shouldering the burden of yet another recession. I could easily do this for every company: Netflix: it's the crappy political shows, Microsoft: it's the telemetry and continually slower product, Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products, Goldman Sachs: it's the bro/frat culture, Most Banks: it's the insulting fees, Amazon: it's the way you treat your warehouse staff: Most Fast Food: it's the price gouging Most Food companies: it's the annoying shrinkflation. Fire these people. They made you short term profits and now your brand is ruined and everyone hates you. But instead they will fire the people who are actually doing their job, and keep all the executives and "thought leaders", or whatever, in their protected positions. I think everyone basically knows why everyone hates facebook and left. Just stop doing that, is what I'm getting at.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
>I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting. In my experience, some non-trivial amount of these cost-control measures is about signaling. I worked in Japan for a large company that allowed employees to ride in first class (Green Car) on the Narita Express when traveling internationally for business; that went away during a period of belt-tightening. Saved a whole $15 each way.
kube-system 4y ago
Remember that their users are not their customers. User experience at either of those businesses is only relevant as much as it is useful in attracting advertisers to the platform. Your butcher isn't too concerned about whether the chickens like the decor in their cage.
- water-your-self 4y ago
  Chickens arent at liberty to choose their butcher, typically.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  The thing Facebook is learning right now is that their cage isn't very good, and the chickens are leaving. Users may not be Facebook's customers, but they are the product. It's hard to attract customers when your product is shrinking, and declining in quality (i.e. skewing older and therefor less appealing to advertisers)
iLoveOncall 4y ago
One day you'll enter the corporate world and understand that getting rid of an executive that took a few bad decisions is a lot more damaging than getting rid of the best unqualified worker in the world. On top of that, I'd argue that steering Facebook and Google in those directions is exactly what their executives and their customers want.
FearlessNebula 4y ago
> Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products This is really disingenuous. They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot. Not exactly what I would call “intentionally slowing working products” but rather “reducing CPU power consumption to mitigate abrupt reboots to keep a reliable user experience”. Granted, Apple was a bit shady by not documenting this and giving the user the option to toggle it, until they were “caught”.
- water-your-self 4y ago
  > They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot Only after they have made it impossibly expensive to replace some lithium. This is an incredibly disingenuous defense of their actions. Apple is fully trying to tie hardware refreshes to the cadence of should be battery refreshes and the frog has been so boiled that android devices realized it was more profitable to follow suit. Apple is incredibly shady and there simply isnt a defense here.
  - babypuncher 4y ago
    Apple is the only one regularly providing 5-6 years of full OS support on their devices, which seems to go against this logic.
  - FearlessNebula 4y ago
    They were offering $30 battery changes IIRC? I’m not sure how my comment was disingenuous
  - Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
    Written from the perspective of someone whose battery never suddenly died from 30% in cold temperatures on a bike ride, leaving no way to phone your family. Apple’s power management for degraded batteries is a good thing and I wish they’d done it sooner.
stevejobs69 4y ago
>Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine. Do you really believe this? How does TikTok fit into this vision of the world that you have constructed? I agree with your premise but it seems like you have made a connection between two unrelated things: 1. People are less interested in Facebook 2. Facebook is a giant, ad serving, spy machine These two can co-exist without a propositional relationship. Unfortunately the average consumer does not care about privacy in the same way that people in this forum do. For what it's worth people have explicitly told me that they enjoy targetted ads.
- rtev 4y ago
  TikTok is happy, Facebook optimized for outrage and conflict. When you only get shown stuff that pisses you off, you’ll get some short-term high engagement at the cost of enjoyment. Ultimately, that gave the strong impression that Facebook is Thanksgiving with your racist uncle, so young people dropped out.
  - hbn 4y ago
    I can't imagine how you could possibly think Facebook is the only platform that optimizes for outrage and conflict. That's the entire social media MO. People certainly do not leave platforms that make them angry. Making people angry generates the most engagement out of anything. Twitter makes people miserable and it seems to be doing just fine. Young people were already leaving Facebook since the early 2010s because their parents were all making accounts, making it less of a "safe" place to express themselves, and all the moms and grandmas just got left there. So Facebook's core, active user demographic became an older generation that skews more conservative, so the outrage porn that circulates there leans in that direction. Whereas every other mainstream platform on the internet has the young people who are more liberal and hate the older generation, so the outrage porn shared around there is about how everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi and how a straight white guy said something fatphobic. And if you're a person into that kind of stuff, that's what your Tiktok feed will be. It's certainly not "happy" unless you train the algorithm to only show you that. It's 2 flavors of equally stupid anger bait to get people refreshing their feed all day. But it's certainly not that people have collectively decided they want happier news feeds. Quite the opposite.
laweijfmvo 4y ago
anecdotally, my (meta) office bathroom hasn't had hand soap for over a week...
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
>Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. This feels like the megacorp version of when a company is caring how much money stocking cola in the company fridge is costing. Which is a good barometer that it’s time to bail in a small company.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago

>I've noticed news articles saying that Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. To me, these are the wrong people to be cutting. In my experience, some non-trivial amount of these cost-control measures is about signaling. I worked in Japan for a large company that allowed employees to ride in first class (Green Car) on the Narita Express when traveling internationally for business; that went away during a period of belt-tightening. Saved a whole $15 each way.

kube-system 4y ago

Remember that their users are not their customers. User experience at either of those businesses is only relevant as much as it is useful in attracting advertisers to the platform. Your butcher isn't too concerned about whether the chickens like the decor in their cage.

water-your-self 4y ago
Chickens arent at liberty to choose their butcher, typically.
babypuncher 4y ago
The thing Facebook is learning right now is that their cage isn't very good, and the chickens are leaving. Users may not be Facebook's customers, but they are the product. It's hard to attract customers when your product is shrinking, and declining in quality (i.e. skewing older and therefor less appealing to advertisers)

iLoveOncall 4y ago

One day you'll enter the corporate world and understand that getting rid of an executive that took a few bad decisions is a lot more damaging than getting rid of the best unqualified worker in the world. On top of that, I'd argue that steering Facebook and Google in those directions is exactly what their executives and their customers want.

FearlessNebula 4y ago

> Apple: it's intentionally slowing working products This is really disingenuous. They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot. Not exactly what I would call “intentionally slowing working products” but rather “reducing CPU power consumption to mitigate abrupt reboots to keep a reliable user experience”. Granted, Apple was a bit shady by not documenting this and giving the user the option to toggle it, until they were “caught”.

water-your-self 4y ago
> They slowed the CPU on products with a worn out battery in order to prevent the CPU from overdrawing from the battery, causing a reboot Only after they have made it impossibly expensive to replace some lithium. This is an incredibly disingenuous defense of their actions. Apple is fully trying to tie hardware refreshes to the cadence of should be battery refreshes and the frog has been so boiled that android devices realized it was more profitable to follow suit. Apple is incredibly shady and there simply isnt a defense here.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  Apple is the only one regularly providing 5-6 years of full OS support on their devices, which seems to go against this logic.
- FearlessNebula 4y ago
  They were offering $30 battery changes IIRC? I’m not sure how my comment was disingenuous
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Written from the perspective of someone whose battery never suddenly died from 30% in cold temperatures on a bike ride, leaving no way to phone your family. Apple’s power management for degraded batteries is a good thing and I wish they’d done it sooner.

stevejobs69 4y ago

>Everyone stopped using facebook because they are uncomfortable using a giant, ad serving, spy machine. Do you really believe this? How does TikTok fit into this vision of the world that you have constructed? I agree with your premise but it seems like you have made a connection between two unrelated things: 1. People are less interested in Facebook 2. Facebook is a giant, ad serving, spy machine These two can co-exist without a propositional relationship. Unfortunately the average consumer does not care about privacy in the same way that people in this forum do. For what it's worth people have explicitly told me that they enjoy targetted ads.

rtev 4y ago
TikTok is happy, Facebook optimized for outrage and conflict. When you only get shown stuff that pisses you off, you’ll get some short-term high engagement at the cost of enjoyment. Ultimately, that gave the strong impression that Facebook is Thanksgiving with your racist uncle, so young people dropped out.
- hbn 4y ago
  I can't imagine how you could possibly think Facebook is the only platform that optimizes for outrage and conflict. That's the entire social media MO. People certainly do not leave platforms that make them angry. Making people angry generates the most engagement out of anything. Twitter makes people miserable and it seems to be doing just fine. Young people were already leaving Facebook since the early 2010s because their parents were all making accounts, making it less of a "safe" place to express themselves, and all the moms and grandmas just got left there. So Facebook's core, active user demographic became an older generation that skews more conservative, so the outrage porn that circulates there leans in that direction. Whereas every other mainstream platform on the internet has the young people who are more liberal and hate the older generation, so the outrage porn shared around there is about how everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi and how a straight white guy said something fatphobic. And if you're a person into that kind of stuff, that's what your Tiktok feed will be. It's certainly not "happy" unless you train the algorithm to only show you that. It's 2 flavors of equally stupid anger bait to get people refreshing their feed all day. But it's certainly not that people have collectively decided they want happier news feeds. Quite the opposite.

laweijfmvo 4y ago

anecdotally, my (meta) office bathroom hasn't had hand soap for over a week...

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

>Meta have been cutting back on support staff, like cleaners and custodial roles. This feels like the megacorp version of when a company is caring how much money stocking cola in the company fridge is costing. Which is a good barometer that it’s time to bail in a small company.