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This is Hacker News. The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished. Every hacker, ev

This is Hacker News. The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished. Every hacker, every entrepreneur, every creator should derive inspiration and uplift from Facebook's story. It's a rare bright day in the middle of the worst economic environment since the 1930s. It doesn't matter whether the company will grow into a $100B valuation. It does matter that it was started in February 2004, by a single guy with a computer, and has affected the lives of billions of people and created billions of dollars in wealth. Maybe the markets won't be kind to them. Maybe they won't grow into the $100B valuation. But outside of those who are direct competitors, I can't understand anyone who actually wishes them ill. As a creator, as an entrepreneur, as a hacker, if you tear down Facebook you're just tearing down yourself.

paul 14y ago
Agreed. The growing levels of envy and cynicism on hn is unhealthy. Trashing other people's efforts doesn't make your own more successful.
- nextstep 14y ago
  I agree. Nearly every mention in HN comments of a newly-successful tech company (Groupon, Zynga, Instagram, etc.) includes regurgitation of the same bullshit anecdotes used to perpetuate the narrative assigned to each company. I have always felt that envy plays a big role in which companies we choose to hate.
  - corford 14y ago
    As a post above me points out, don't confuse envy with cynicism. Groupon and Zynga are both awful companies (in terms of furthering the cause of humanity at least) and both are currently trading at under their initial IPO price. Hate is a strong word but forgive me if I (and others) don't choose to point to Zynga and Groupon as paragons of success.
  - beedogs 14y ago
    Every one of the companies you just named are horrible. There's more to it than "envy". It's naive to kneejerk like that.
- larrys 14y ago
  "cynicism" Because it's a boatload of money. Over twice the value of HP and almost half the value of Walmart. Slightly higher market cap than Amazon. It's absurd. I think there is plenty of reason for cynicism. And I didn't know that HN readers were supposed to all be cut from the same bolt of cloth.
  - f45s8g2 14y ago
    Well said.
  - maigret 14y ago
    Agree with your first statement. But there is quite a reason for that - Zuck succeeded at making FB a brand people like and are emotionally bound to. Every entrepreneur should aim at that. Hackers are often low on emotion (so is said to be Zuck also), but they succeeded at that. That's why everyone is so crazy at that IPO and letting all reasonnable calculations go.
- vibrunazo 14y ago
  Do you also believe the consumer right activists trying to stop snake oil salesmen, are only doing so because they're envy of all the money the snake oil salesmen are doing? Do you think the "right" thing for the activists to do would be to support snake oil sales, so that they, the activists could have a better shot at selling their own snake oil as well? Not all entrepreneurs are the same. Some of us are actually not trying to sell snake oil, and wouldn't even if we had the chance.
chestercheetaz 14y ago
I'm a firm believer that if you "dis Dre, you dis yourself." but Facebook? not so much...
Retric 14y ago
While I respect what it took to get Facebook to this point and realize it has helped millions of people. I still find the entire concept rather creepy, and much of there upper management sleazy. I also expect a lot of people to lose a 'lot' of money either directly or due to huge opportunity costs when buying Facebook stock. PS: I have never signed up, and I know plenty of people that stopped using Facebook. I also see people spending hours a day while at work on Facebook so they could become a 500 billion dollar company, but it's got nothing to do with envoy that I have told many people to avoid the stock.
- paul 14y ago
  How much of the upper management do you personally know? Have you actually met them, or are you just repeating the opinion of the hn mob?
  - Retric 14y ago
    I find it amusing that you assume those are the only two options. I joined HN 1701 days ago, but I already had a dim view of FB's management due to several actions taken by the company as well as some of their internal policies.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    You don't actually have to meet people to form an opinion about them, you can simply use all the information at your disposal and base your judgement on that. If a lot of people reach the same conclusion that does not automatically mean that they're a mob, they could also simply be in agreement. Zuckerberg comes across in interviews that I've watched and in the statements that he makes as the guy that got away with it. And Facebooks strategies and actions re-inforce that. It is very well possible that that is a wrong conclusion but to date I have yet to see much evidence of that. If facebook throws its considerable weight behind an all-out effort to protect the privacy of its users at the behest of the upper management then I'll re-consider that position but until then my opinion will remain where it is today: distrust coupled with a creep factor that is right off the scale. The German Data protection watchdog today issued a message that Facebook is in breach of European privacy laws: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/05/18/2149357/german-privacy-official-warns.html http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/05/18/2149357/german-priv... That alone should make you wonder about whether or not the FB upper management is playing nice with its users or not.
backspace 14y ago
This is Hacker News. Where hard working entrepreneurs look for advice, hope, reality checks, and support. Yes, Facebook has wildly exceeded what most people expected. But to build a social honey pot isn't to inspire other hackers/entrepreneurs. I don't wish them ill but I also don't take any inspiration from Zuckerberg/Facebook. In fact, I learnt many things not to do (i.e. screwing your founders, doing shady deals, making immature decisions, etc.). Interestingly, Facebook has succeeded so far in spite of doing those things. And I give more credit to Sheryl Sandberg than Zuckerberg. So excuse me if I don't agree that the top-voted comment on this thread should be words of praise for Zuckerberg.
- f45s8g2 14y ago
  Social honeypot. Perfect. HN itself is a sort of social honeypot. But just look at what FB does with the information they collect. They simply have no sense of restraint. And it all starts with Zuckerberg and his attitude.
JonnieCache 14y ago
This is hacker news. Are you seriously surprised that there is hate for a company that seems to be dedicated to working against privacy/anonymity on the internet? That's not mutually exclusive with respect for a lot of peoples honest hard work.
corford 14y ago
Except it isn't quite as "rags to riches" or "one man's dogged perseverance against the odds" as "one guy and his computer" implies, is it? Mark stumbled upon the thing while at Harvard after goofing around with a few different concepts for fun (like most teenage/college hackers do). The site took off due to a mix of: a). being birthed in Harvard (with all the clout, connections, mentoring and cachet that brings) b). good timing (in terms of 2004 being long enough after the first dot com bust and before the crisis of 2008) c). taking a fairly straight forward idea and improving on those before (live journal, myspace etc.) The only cool thing about facebook as far as I'm concerned is the backend. Scaling a system to support 1 billion odd users is very cool and very interesting. Appreciating and respecting it on a technical level doesn't mean you have to appreciate Facebook "the whole", what it stands for or what it does. Also, just because it's an impressively engineered system doesn't mean it's worth 100+ billion dollars. Edit: I guess I (and presumably some others) feel that the reward (a 100+ billion dollar valuation and 1000 millionaires created over night) doesn't immediately seem to translate to the effort spent getting there.
- paul 14y ago
  Growing to a billion users is harder than you think. There were many other social networks, including ones started at other top schools, but only one survived, and it was because they understood what makes a site like fb work.
  - corford 14y ago
    Yes, but is it $100 billion's worth of hard work? I guess that's what the market gets to decide. Edit: also half the problem is caused by assuming 1 billion users translates to anything meaningful. Apart from being an impressive number in its own right, what exactly does it mean? Facebook is free to use and helps satisfy basic human social desires in a digital way. Great but would they have 1 billion users if it wasn't free? No. If I could distribute beer for free and and offered every male on the planet over the age of 18 a free keg, I'd probably have a billion takers.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
AznHisoka 14y ago
Facebook was just an iteration over other social networks. If FB didn't exist today, things would be a tad different - we'd be using MySpace to connect, Flickr to share photos, and AIM to chat. It's not like they introduced the internet, or a cure to cancer.
- bmj 14y ago
  Well, except that unlike using Flickr for photos, AIM for chat, and MySpace to connect, using Facebook puts all your eggs in a single basket. As others have pointed out, that is likely the source of much of the disdain for FB 'round these parts.
  - brudgers 14y ago
    I've got some eggs at Linkedin.
    - jaxn 14y ago
      Related: LinkedIn has a P/E of over 600 today. It makes Facebook's 100 seem almost conservative.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Google was just an iteration over other search engines.
  - AznHisoka 14y ago
    There's a magnitude improvement from Altavista to Google. Not so with Facebook over an alternative.
    - theorique 14y ago
      Were you using Friendster in 2004? At that time, Facebook was a real quantum leap over a site that didn't let you log in because it was too slow. For me, at least, that was the critical step - having a site that just worked.
mikeryan 14y ago
Personally I don't wish Facebook any ill will. I think they've built a hell of a company. That being said there seems to be quiet a bit of hubris around it as a company, much of which is likely not their fault and more based on the media attention which surrounds them. The 100B valuation (and all the previous funding round valuations) is a reflection on this. I think this is the first time where Facebook has to prove their value on an open market and all of us who have wondered what we're missing on those monster rounds get to see if we were right (or wrong) - and a lot of us like to be right.... Its a real interesting case study.
alecco 14y ago
Facebook was very dodgy from the start. And this IPO is the complete opposite of Google's. The unfairness and overhyping with every possible venue is ridiculous. The outcome of this trend of "evil" IPOs will likely splatter the rest of our community for outsiders, like it happened in the dotcom bubble. Healthy and ethical startups will have trouble getting reasonably sized funds. You should read about the Greenshoe trick, the tiny amount of shares on the market (~450m vs 2bn) and the trick Zuckerberg is placing on investors. No wonder it's back to 38 right now (and not lower because of underwriters holding the price there). You can only fool people for so long. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/caf4b0a4-a067-11e1-88e6-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/caf4b0a4-a067-11e1-88e6-00144feabd... (registration walled article, but it's free) The "evil" tech IPOs: Groupon, Zynga and Facebook. I hope they go away quickly so our industry can get past them. Reckoning day: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN -8% today http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA -15% today http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB +0.1% today
jacquesm 14y ago
> The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished. The top voted comment actually is an excerpt from a book by a man that I respect a whole lot more than I respect Mark Zuckerberg. For one he seemed a genuinely nice and modest human being. He also influenced the lives of countless people by being creative rather than by selling off their private details to the highest bidder. I really like that top voted comment, instead of gushing admiration for a pile of virtual money it causes you to reflect and think. Making a lot of money does not automatically equate accomplishment. Contrast this with the SpaceX announcement on the homepage at the moment. If Elon Musk succeeds, which I certainly hope for then that will be an accomplishment. Even if SpaceX fails it will still be a huge and daring move. Compared to giving humanity a new window on access to space photo sharing seems a little underwhelming. If you can't understand anyone who actually wishes them ill then please consider that we do not all have the same goals and we do not all have the same vision of what the internet could be like. As a creator, as an business person and a hacker I would happily see facebook replaced by a company or an entity that gave us 80% of the functionality with our joint privacy in tact. That would be progress. Facebook is just AOL re-invented for the new millenium.
- staunch 14y ago
  It must be thoughtlessness. You can't honestly look at Facebook's contribution to the Arab Spring (and similar social justice causes) or the millions of people it has reconnected (long-lost family/friends) and think that SpaceX has any chance of creating comparable positive impact at any point in the near future. I like SpaceX too. It's every geek's childhood fantasy. It's a great thing. Elon is the real Tony Stark. But the reality is that far more humans benefit from relatively mundane advances in things like cell phones and social networking than rockets. Facebook is connecting humanity together in a way that's never been possible before. Improving the lives of billions of people in a meaningful way is an undeniably Big Fucking Deal.
  - BrentRitterbeck 14y ago
    I will agree on the timing of benefits to mankind; however, I'm willing to bet far more humans benefit from advances in rocketry over the long run. Consider what we have done already with rockets. There are many satellites orbiting the earth that make huge communication networks possible. Rockets sent them up there. SpaceX may not have immediate applications, but someone needs to be pushing the frontiers of science and technology. If there wasn't a space program going back decades, I seriously doubt we would have the ability to communicate the way do today.
noname123 14y ago
I'm a code monkey who trades as well. They are two completely different things by the way. Programming motivates you to never give up on your code whereas trading disciplines you to never fight against the market. Personally, I think that the recent price action on FB, ZNGA and GRPN means that the market has no appetite for over-hyped valuation of web 2.0 companies trading at 100x their earnings (or loss for that matter). So I'll be buying bearish call spreads or outright puts when these POS bounce. I have no ill feeling towards Zuckerberg but want to make a profit trading. Now on the topic of "creators" creating value, it's my opinion that the guys that have created value in computing are Linus Tovald and rms'es, not the start-up kids who do copy-paste RoRpasta on Stack Overflow and get ridiculous valuation 'cause we are in a bubble. IMO it's the FB engineers that optimized php engine and open-sourced, not Mark Zuckerberg nor Cheryl Sanderberg nor the VCs.
larrys 14y ago
"The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished." Then there is this HN thread today: http://smalldogsbigdogs.tumblr.com/post/23291496479/avoiding-depression-while-not-running-a-1b-company http://smalldogsbigdogs.tumblr.com/post/23291496479/avoiding... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992296 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992296 Specifically: "As the founder of a small company in Chicago who only took $17k from YCombinator 6 years ago (YC-W06) and now runs a classic “lifestyle” business that support myself and a small team from client revenues, I find myself wavering between being fairly satisfied with the state of my business life to mild depression and jealousy that I’m not in a situation to be cashing in myself." None of the above is a problem for a) the (positive) peanut gallery on HN or b) Angel investors or c) HN or d) VC's. They are either disconnected from the pain or have spread their risk among multiple companies at the psychological expense of the people who think of themselves of failures. The support system for these failures is reading other people's cynicism and maybe by reading that some will be prevented from thinking this black swan event might actually be possible. Edit: Above where I say c) "HN" I mean c) "YC"
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Over the years I've watched this exact conversation play out, dozens of times. I personally was inspired to leave Sun by a guy I know who worked there, and seemed like a complete idiot, who joined a startup and subsequently got reasonably wealthy [1]. The other bit of experience I brought to the table was growing up in Las Vegas Nevada where money was a sort of 'quantum' thing in that sometimes you had it, sometimes you didn't. The Facebook story is definitely not "a single guy with a computer," which the movie The Social Network should have made abundantly clear, but it does reflect Zuckerberg's singular dedication to his vision of what it should be. Not surprisingly I know other CEOs who have carried that same sort of singular vision in companies right into the ground. That Facebook is IPO'ing today is great, but its story is at least as much luck and circumstance as it is the story of the CEO and his ideas. What is also true is that human nature involves evaluation of self, and that evaluation is done most strongly against peers. Many people experience it at their first significant High School or College reunion. It goes like this: "Hey Bob, wow, its been 5 years since Alma Mater U, how is it going?" "Hi Alice, well I'm really excited because my wife and I just bought a plane! Can you believe it?! You know I've always loved flying and well when I sold Foobits I had some extra cash and its been great! It's surprisingly economical to fly up and down the coast rather than driving for flying commercially ..." Now if Alice hasn't been as 'successful' as Bob and she feels like she left Alma Mater U with the same 'chances' as Bob did, she might feel any number of negative emotions, anger, shame, jealousy, Etc. Contrast that with the second scenario: "Hey Charlie, wow its been 5 years since Alma Mater U how is it going?" "Hey Alice, well its going alright. I managed save up enough to get a house but with the big crash that's underwater. The downturn hit my industry pretty hard and so I've been consulting and what not but now I'm looking into a way to strategically exit my house without having to have a foreclosure or a bankruptcy on my record, but I know its pretty hard everywhere, how about you?" Now if Alice in this scenario isn't looking at a personal bankruptcy before the age of 25, and is gainfully employed, she might naturally feel like her talents combined with the equivalent experience at Alma Mater U has given her an edge over folks like Charlie. She feels good about her choices. But what is really happening is that the first 10 years 'out of the gate', starting with the last year of college will show huge variations in 'success' across your peers. Some will prosper quickly, some will spiral into poverty, some will vanish into the fabric of 9 to 5 life and others will quietly end their lives, the whole range of outcomes both good and bad. And all during that time/process people will be trying to sort out how much of the success or lack of success of their peers reflects on their own success or lack of success. As folks work through that process they sometimes become enlightened, sometimes bitter, often cynical, and ideally wiser. [1] "Reasonably wealthy" in this context means one could live off the proceeds with a middle income lifestyle without further employment.
cube13 14y ago
>Every hacker, every entrepreneur, every creator should derive inspiration and uplift from Facebook's story. It's a rare bright day in the middle of the worst economic environment since the 1930s. It doesn't matter whether the company will grow into a $100B valuation. Here's the problem: Facebook doesn't have time to "grow" into the valuation. They're worth that much to investors now. They need to prove that they are worth that kind of investment money. They need to prove that they can make the kind of money that $100+B companies make. Facebook made a TON of money today. The size of the IPO is simply way out of scale with the actual company. Facebook had a net income of $1B last year. Companies that have market valuations around $100B make that much per month. Now, if Facebook's market cap was around $30B or $40B, I think everyone on HN would be celebrating their success, because that's a good valuation for a $1B/year company.
muzz 14y ago
> It's a rare bright day in the middle of the worst economic environment since the 1930s. Not trying to nitpick on a post I mostly agree with, but the second half of that sentence would apply to late 2008, not 2012. Corporate profits are at record highs, the stock market has doubled off the lows, etc. It amazes me the denial of the phenomenal economic recovery of 2009.
- etrain 14y ago
  Stock market performance != economic environment. Unemployment is still as high as its been in a generation (or more, depending on how you count), and real growth has been highly stagnant. Yes, we pulled away from the abyss, but outside of tech, it's brutal out there.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

paul 14y ago

Agreed. The growing levels of envy and cynicism on hn is unhealthy. Trashing other people's efforts doesn't make your own more successful.

nextstep 14y ago
I agree. Nearly every mention in HN comments of a newly-successful tech company (Groupon, Zynga, Instagram, etc.) includes regurgitation of the same bullshit anecdotes used to perpetuate the narrative assigned to each company. I have always felt that envy plays a big role in which companies we choose to hate.
- corford 14y ago
  As a post above me points out, don't confuse envy with cynicism. Groupon and Zynga are both awful companies (in terms of furthering the cause of humanity at least) and both are currently trading at under their initial IPO price. Hate is a strong word but forgive me if I (and others) don't choose to point to Zynga and Groupon as paragons of success.
- beedogs 14y ago
  Every one of the companies you just named are horrible. There's more to it than "envy". It's naive to kneejerk like that.
larrys 14y ago
"cynicism" Because it's a boatload of money. Over twice the value of HP and almost half the value of Walmart. Slightly higher market cap than Amazon. It's absurd. I think there is plenty of reason for cynicism. And I didn't know that HN readers were supposed to all be cut from the same bolt of cloth.
- f45s8g2 14y ago
  Well said.
- maigret 14y ago
  Agree with your first statement. But there is quite a reason for that - Zuck succeeded at making FB a brand people like and are emotionally bound to. Every entrepreneur should aim at that. Hackers are often low on emotion (so is said to be Zuck also), but they succeeded at that. That's why everyone is so crazy at that IPO and letting all reasonnable calculations go.
vibrunazo 14y ago
Do you also believe the consumer right activists trying to stop snake oil salesmen, are only doing so because they're envy of all the money the snake oil salesmen are doing? Do you think the "right" thing for the activists to do would be to support snake oil sales, so that they, the activists could have a better shot at selling their own snake oil as well? Not all entrepreneurs are the same. Some of us are actually not trying to sell snake oil, and wouldn't even if we had the chance.

chestercheetaz 14y ago

I'm a firm believer that if you "dis Dre, you dis yourself." but Facebook? not so much...

Retric 14y ago

While I respect what it took to get Facebook to this point and realize it has helped millions of people. I still find the entire concept rather creepy, and much of there upper management sleazy. I also expect a lot of people to lose a 'lot' of money either directly or due to huge opportunity costs when buying Facebook stock. PS: I have never signed up, and I know plenty of people that stopped using Facebook. I also see people spending hours a day while at work on Facebook so they could become a 500 billion dollar company, but it's got nothing to do with envoy that I have told many people to avoid the stock.

paul 14y ago
How much of the upper management do you personally know? Have you actually met them, or are you just repeating the opinion of the hn mob?
- Retric 14y ago
  I find it amusing that you assume those are the only two options. I joined HN 1701 days ago, but I already had a dim view of FB's management due to several actions taken by the company as well as some of their internal policies.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  You don't actually have to meet people to form an opinion about them, you can simply use all the information at your disposal and base your judgement on that. If a lot of people reach the same conclusion that does not automatically mean that they're a mob, they could also simply be in agreement. Zuckerberg comes across in interviews that I've watched and in the statements that he makes as the guy that got away with it. And Facebooks strategies and actions re-inforce that. It is very well possible that that is a wrong conclusion but to date I have yet to see much evidence of that. If facebook throws its considerable weight behind an all-out effort to protect the privacy of its users at the behest of the upper management then I'll re-consider that position but until then my opinion will remain where it is today: distrust coupled with a creep factor that is right off the scale. The German Data protection watchdog today issued a message that Facebook is in breach of European privacy laws: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/05/18/2149357/german-privacy-official-warns.html http://www.thenewstribune.com/2012/05/18/2149357/german-priv... That alone should make you wonder about whether or not the FB upper management is playing nice with its users or not.

backspace 14y ago

This is Hacker News. Where hard working entrepreneurs look for advice, hope, reality checks, and support. Yes, Facebook has wildly exceeded what most people expected. But to build a social honey pot isn't to inspire other hackers/entrepreneurs. I don't wish them ill but I also don't take any inspiration from Zuckerberg/Facebook. In fact, I learnt many things not to do (i.e. screwing your founders, doing shady deals, making immature decisions, etc.). Interestingly, Facebook has succeeded so far in spite of doing those things. And I give more credit to Sheryl Sandberg than Zuckerberg. So excuse me if I don't agree that the top-voted comment on this thread should be words of praise for Zuckerberg.

f45s8g2 14y ago
Social honeypot. Perfect. HN itself is a sort of social honeypot. But just look at what FB does with the information they collect. They simply have no sense of restraint. And it all starts with Zuckerberg and his attitude.

JonnieCache 14y ago

This is hacker news. Are you seriously surprised that there is hate for a company that seems to be dedicated to working against privacy/anonymity on the internet? That's not mutually exclusive with respect for a lot of peoples honest hard work.

corford 14y ago

Except it isn't quite as "rags to riches" or "one man's dogged perseverance against the odds" as "one guy and his computer" implies, is it? Mark stumbled upon the thing while at Harvard after goofing around with a few different concepts for fun (like most teenage/college hackers do). The site took off due to a mix of: a). being birthed in Harvard (with all the clout, connections, mentoring and cachet that brings) b). good timing (in terms of 2004 being long enough after the first dot com bust and before the crisis of 2008) c). taking a fairly straight forward idea and improving on those before (live journal, myspace etc.) The only cool thing about facebook as far as I'm concerned is the backend. Scaling a system to support 1 billion odd users is very cool and very interesting. Appreciating and respecting it on a technical level doesn't mean you have to appreciate Facebook "the whole", what it stands for or what it does. Also, just because it's an impressively engineered system doesn't mean it's worth 100+ billion dollars. Edit: I guess I (and presumably some others) feel that the reward (a 100+ billion dollar valuation and 1000 millionaires created over night) doesn't immediately seem to translate to the effort spent getting there.

paul 14y ago
Growing to a billion users is harder than you think. There were many other social networks, including ones started at other top schools, but only one survived, and it was because they understood what makes a site like fb work.
- corford 14y ago
  Yes, but is it $100 billion's worth of hard work? I guess that's what the market gets to decide. Edit: also half the problem is caused by assuming 1 billion users translates to anything meaningful. Apart from being an impressive number in its own right, what exactly does it mean? Facebook is free to use and helps satisfy basic human social desires in a digital way. Great but would they have 1 billion users if it wasn't free? No. If I could distribute beer for free and and offered every male on the planet over the age of 18 a free keg, I'd probably have a billion takers.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago

AznHisoka 14y ago

Facebook was just an iteration over other social networks. If FB didn't exist today, things would be a tad different - we'd be using MySpace to connect, Flickr to share photos, and AIM to chat. It's not like they introduced the internet, or a cure to cancer.

bmj 14y ago
Well, except that unlike using Flickr for photos, AIM for chat, and MySpace to connect, using Facebook puts all your eggs in a single basket. As others have pointed out, that is likely the source of much of the disdain for FB 'round these parts.
- brudgers 14y ago
  I've got some eggs at Linkedin.
  - jaxn 14y ago
    Related: LinkedIn has a P/E of over 600 today. It makes Facebook's 100 seem almost conservative.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Google was just an iteration over other search engines.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  There's a magnitude improvement from Altavista to Google. Not so with Facebook over an alternative.
  - theorique 14y ago
    Were you using Friendster in 2004? At that time, Facebook was a real quantum leap over a site that didn't let you log in because it was too slow. For me, at least, that was the critical step - having a site that just worked.

mikeryan 14y ago

Personally I don't wish Facebook any ill will. I think they've built a hell of a company. That being said there seems to be quiet a bit of hubris around it as a company, much of which is likely not their fault and more based on the media attention which surrounds them. The 100B valuation (and all the previous funding round valuations) is a reflection on this. I think this is the first time where Facebook has to prove their value on an open market and all of us who have wondered what we're missing on those monster rounds get to see if we were right (or wrong) - and a lot of us like to be right.... Its a real interesting case study.

alecco 14y ago

Facebook was very dodgy from the start. And this IPO is the complete opposite of Google's. The unfairness and overhyping with every possible venue is ridiculous. The outcome of this trend of "evil" IPOs will likely splatter the rest of our community for outsiders, like it happened in the dotcom bubble. Healthy and ethical startups will have trouble getting reasonably sized funds. You should read about the Greenshoe trick, the tiny amount of shares on the market (~450m vs 2bn) and the trick Zuckerberg is placing on investors. No wonder it's back to 38 right now (and not lower because of underwriters holding the price there). You can only fool people for so long. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/caf4b0a4-a067-11e1-88e6-00144feabdc0.html http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/caf4b0a4-a067-11e1-88e6-00144feabd... (registration walled article, but it's free) The "evil" tech IPOs: Groupon, Zynga and Facebook. I hope they go away quickly so our industry can get past them. Reckoning day: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGRPN -8% today http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:ZNGA -15% today http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AFB +0.1% today

jacquesm 14y ago

> The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished. The top voted comment actually is an excerpt from a book by a man that I respect a whole lot more than I respect Mark Zuckerberg. For one he seemed a genuinely nice and modest human being. He also influenced the lives of countless people by being creative rather than by selling off their private details to the highest bidder. I really like that top voted comment, instead of gushing admiration for a pile of virtual money it causes you to reflect and think. Making a lot of money does not automatically equate accomplishment. Contrast this with the SpaceX announcement on the homepage at the moment. If Elon Musk succeeds, which I certainly hope for then that will be an accomplishment. Even if SpaceX fails it will still be a huge and daring move. Compared to giving humanity a new window on access to space photo sharing seems a little underwhelming. If you can't understand anyone who actually wishes them ill then please consider that we do not all have the same goals and we do not all have the same vision of what the internet could be like. As a creator, as an business person and a hacker I would happily see facebook replaced by a company or an entity that gave us 80% of the functionality with our joint privacy in tact. That would be progress. Facebook is just AOL re-invented for the new millenium.

staunch 14y ago
It must be thoughtlessness. You can't honestly look at Facebook's contribution to the Arab Spring (and similar social justice causes) or the millions of people it has reconnected (long-lost family/friends) and think that SpaceX has any chance of creating comparable positive impact at any point in the near future. I like SpaceX too. It's every geek's childhood fantasy. It's a great thing. Elon is the real Tony Stark. But the reality is that far more humans benefit from relatively mundane advances in things like cell phones and social networking than rockets. Facebook is connecting humanity together in a way that's never been possible before. Improving the lives of billions of people in a meaningful way is an undeniably Big Fucking Deal.
- BrentRitterbeck 14y ago
  I will agree on the timing of benefits to mankind; however, I'm willing to bet far more humans benefit from advances in rocketry over the long run. Consider what we have done already with rockets. There are many satellites orbiting the earth that make huge communication networks possible. Rockets sent them up there. SpaceX may not have immediate applications, but someone needs to be pushing the frontiers of science and technology. If there wasn't a space program going back decades, I seriously doubt we would have the ability to communicate the way do today.

noname123 14y ago

I'm a code monkey who trades as well. They are two completely different things by the way. Programming motivates you to never give up on your code whereas trading disciplines you to never fight against the market. Personally, I think that the recent price action on FB, ZNGA and GRPN means that the market has no appetite for over-hyped valuation of web 2.0 companies trading at 100x their earnings (or loss for that matter). So I'll be buying bearish call spreads or outright puts when these POS bounce. I have no ill feeling towards Zuckerberg but want to make a profit trading. Now on the topic of "creators" creating value, it's my opinion that the guys that have created value in computing are Linus Tovald and rms'es, not the start-up kids who do copy-paste RoRpasta on Stack Overflow and get ridiculous valuation 'cause we are in a bubble. IMO it's the FB engineers that optimized php engine and open-sourced, not Mark Zuckerberg nor Cheryl Sanderberg nor the VCs.

larrys 14y ago

"The top-voted comment on this thread really should be words of praise for what Zuckerberg and his team have accomplished." Then there is this HN thread today: http://smalldogsbigdogs.tumblr.com/post/23291496479/avoiding-depression-while-not-running-a-1b-company http://smalldogsbigdogs.tumblr.com/post/23291496479/avoiding... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992296 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3992296 Specifically: "As the founder of a small company in Chicago who only took $17k from YCombinator 6 years ago (YC-W06) and now runs a classic “lifestyle” business that support myself and a small team from client revenues, I find myself wavering between being fairly satisfied with the state of my business life to mild depression and jealousy that I’m not in a situation to be cashing in myself." None of the above is a problem for a) the (positive) peanut gallery on HN or b) Angel investors or c) HN or d) VC's. They are either disconnected from the pain or have spread their risk among multiple companies at the psychological expense of the people who think of themselves of failures. The support system for these failures is reading other people's cynicism and maybe by reading that some will be prevented from thinking this black swan event might actually be possible. Edit: Above where I say c) "HN" I mean c) "YC"

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Over the years I've watched this exact conversation play out, dozens of times. I personally was inspired to leave Sun by a guy I know who worked there, and seemed like a complete idiot, who joined a startup and subsequently got reasonably wealthy [1]. The other bit of experience I brought to the table was growing up in Las Vegas Nevada where money was a sort of 'quantum' thing in that sometimes you had it, sometimes you didn't. The Facebook story is definitely not "a single guy with a computer," which the movie The Social Network should have made abundantly clear, but it does reflect Zuckerberg's singular dedication to his vision of what it should be. Not surprisingly I know other CEOs who have carried that same sort of singular vision in companies right into the ground. That Facebook is IPO'ing today is great, but its story is at least as much luck and circumstance as it is the story of the CEO and his ideas. What is also true is that human nature involves evaluation of self, and that evaluation is done most strongly against peers. Many people experience it at their first significant High School or College reunion. It goes like this: "Hey Bob, wow, its been 5 years since Alma Mater U, how is it going?" "Hi Alice, well I'm really excited because my wife and I just bought a plane! Can you believe it?! You know I've always loved flying and well when I sold Foobits I had some extra cash and its been great! It's surprisingly economical to fly up and down the coast rather than driving for flying commercially ..." Now if Alice hasn't been as 'successful' as Bob and she feels like she left Alma Mater U with the same 'chances' as Bob did, she might feel any number of negative emotions, anger, shame, jealousy, Etc. Contrast that with the second scenario: "Hey Charlie, wow its been 5 years since Alma Mater U how is it going?" "Hey Alice, well its going alright. I managed save up enough to get a house but with the big crash that's underwater. The downturn hit my industry pretty hard and so I've been consulting and what not but now I'm looking into a way to strategically exit my house without having to have a foreclosure or a bankruptcy on my record, but I know its pretty hard everywhere, how about you?" Now if Alice in this scenario isn't looking at a personal bankruptcy before the age of 25, and is gainfully employed, she might naturally feel like her talents combined with the equivalent experience at Alma Mater U has given her an edge over folks like Charlie. She feels good about her choices. But what is really happening is that the first 10 years 'out of the gate', starting with the last year of college will show huge variations in 'success' across your peers. Some will prosper quickly, some will spiral into poverty, some will vanish into the fabric of 9 to 5 life and others will quietly end their lives, the whole range of outcomes both good and bad. And all during that time/process people will be trying to sort out how much of the success or lack of success of their peers reflects on their own success or lack of success. As folks work through that process they sometimes become enlightened, sometimes bitter, often cynical, and ideally wiser. [1] "Reasonably wealthy" in this context means one could live off the proceeds with a middle income lifestyle without further employment.

cube13 14y ago

>Every hacker, every entrepreneur, every creator should derive inspiration and uplift from Facebook's story. It's a rare bright day in the middle of the worst economic environment since the 1930s. It doesn't matter whether the company will grow into a $100B valuation. Here's the problem: Facebook doesn't have time to "grow" into the valuation. They're worth that much to investors now. They need to prove that they are worth that kind of investment money. They need to prove that they can make the kind of money that $100+B companies make. Facebook made a TON of money today. The size of the IPO is simply way out of scale with the actual company. Facebook had a net income of $1B last year. Companies that have market valuations around $100B make that much per month. Now, if Facebook's market cap was around $30B or $40B, I think everyone on HN would be celebrating their success, because that's a good valuation for a $1B/year company.

muzz 14y ago

> It's a rare bright day in the middle of the worst economic environment since the 1930s. Not trying to nitpick on a post I mostly agree with, but the second half of that sentence would apply to late 2008, not 2012. Corporate profits are at record highs, the stock market has doubled off the lows, etc. It amazes me the denial of the phenomenal economic recovery of 2009.

etrain 14y ago
Stock market performance != economic environment. Unemployment is still as high as its been in a generation (or more, depending on how you count), and real growth has been highly stagnant. Yes, we pulled away from the abyss, but outside of tech, it's brutal out there.

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