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Look, I agree that this was a terrible, terrible situation that caused a _lot_ of pain for publishers (and contributed to many outlets becomingly meaningfully w

Look, I agree that this was a terrible, terrible situation that caused a _lot_ of pain for publishers (and contributed to many outlets becomingly meaningfully worse for me). That being said, this was a bug in the code. All of us write bugs, and so we should maybe not be as harsh to other people who do. Was it a convenient bug? Yes it was, it helped push a narrative around video and provided more videos for people on FB. Was that intentional? Almost certainly not, although they should've fixed it much, much quicker.

hobs 2y ago
At facebook's size and for the duration that lie was told, no, that's inexcusable. That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  When this happened, Facebook was a much, much smaller company. They made the decision around pushing videos before this code was written, because of the engagement of videos on Facebook and Instagram. Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
  - hobs 2y ago
    Ah yes, 1.5B users, absolutely tiny :) When my company made a mistake that cost our customers 750k, we fell on our sword and recouped them the cost. We had 11k users at the time :)
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      > Ah yes, 1.5B users, absolutely tiny :) I meant in terms of employees. About 4.5k in my recall, for running FB, IG and Whatsapp, as well as all of the ads products.
marcus_holmes 2y ago
It wasn't a bug. It was deliberate deception. As other have said, they've lost court cases over it. I'm a dev, I ship bugs all the time. When I discover one, I fix it asap, apologise to everyone, make amends if I can. Zuck did none of that.

hobs 2y ago

At facebook's size and for the duration that lie was told, no, that's inexcusable. That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.

disgruntledphd2 2y ago
When this happened, Facebook was a much, much smaller company. They made the decision around pushing videos before this code was written, because of the engagement of videos on Facebook and Instagram. Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
- hobs 2y ago
  Ah yes, 1.5B users, absolutely tiny :) When my company made a mistake that cost our customers 750k, we fell on our sword and recouped them the cost. We had 11k users at the time :)
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    > Ah yes, 1.5B users, absolutely tiny :) I meant in terms of employees. About 4.5k in my recall, for running FB, IG and Whatsapp, as well as all of the ads products.

marcus_holmes 2y ago

It wasn't a bug. It was deliberate deception. As other have said, they've lost court cases over it. I'm a dev, I ship bugs all the time. When I discover one, I fix it asap, apologise to everyone, make amends if I can. Zuck did none of that.